skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what will really help us to get at a better estimate
is to answer the question whether there exists life in our
solar system that evolved independently of that on Earth.

That's definitely the big question. But you left out the elephant in the room: is there life right here on Earth that's evolved independently? Abiogenesis doesn't simply halt after it's achieved its "goal". Perhaps we take the common-origin hypothesis for granted (that the "tree of life" has one root, and is in fact a tree), but it's actually nontrivial, strong evidence about the rate of abiogenesis, right under our noses. If it's true.

There's no hard reason why another, orthogonal family of life couldn't coexist with DNA/RNA life. We have 10^7 extant species of DNA/RNA life; that's an existence proof that hostile, competing "types" of life can coexist. Suppose we found terrestrial "XNA life" with a biochemistry totally unrelated to anything else, with no possible common origin or lateral gene transfer. Then we would know life on Earth developed independently N >= 2 times, instead of N >= 1. That would change a lot; we could update P(life | Earth-like planet) from the subjective probability range [10^-Graham's number, 1) to something more like [10^-4, 1).

What's really surprising is that this is completely untested! We genuinely don't know if there's "alien" life on Earth, because we don't know how to look for it. There's no black-box tool to approach unknown biochemistry:

Some have postulated the existence of a 'shadow biosphere'
on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered
because scientists simply don't know where to look. It could
contain life that relies on a fundamentally different
biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even
entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing
inherited information that do not rely on DNA or
proteins. [...] The trick is deciding what to look for and
how to detect it. The usual way that researchers search for
new organisms — by sequencing DNA or RNA — will not pick up
life that does not depend on them.

http://www.nature.com/news/life-changing-experiments-the-bio...

...We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life
right under our noses...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/02/shadow-biosphere-migh...
> If institutional partners treated MOOCs as a marketing exercise for their university's brand

Top universities already have plenty of brand recognition and get way more applicants than what they can accept. The monetary value of any additional marketing is probably very close to zero for them.
Why not? What's the cost? What's the benefit? I create new accounts for all sites I use, including hacker news, every year or so.
See Isaac Asimov's the Last Question for a recursive god human relationship
I'm running into this problem right now for my app, and there are reasonably priced cloud options out there. Mac OS doesn't run on commodity hardware so it isn't surprising that you can't set up a CI build on commodity hardware. Put another way, Mac OS is not like Windows and Linux: the software is inextricably linked to the hardware.
In estimating a probability for the occurrence of life in the universe, the authors essentially claim to know the probability of their own existence.

For me, that's a red flag. I can't know the probability of a phenomenon which my existence depends on just by observing my existence alone, because I can't observe all of the cases where the phenomenon does not occur and I do not exist.
A good rule of thumb is that a consumer electronics product should retail for about 2.5x the COGS (cost of goods sold). That's pretty much where the iPhone sits.

I don't see evidence of excessive margins on hardware; I see a company that's planned for and executed on proper margins.
They also need an engine rebuild every how many miles?
(edit: deleted my comment, decided that Russia is an inflammatory topic unrelated to the article posted)
:D

I actually had no idea anyone had trouble with those countries until I visited Vienna and the tourist shops had a bunch of ironic t-shirts with Kangaroos and boomerangs on them and stuff.
This is part of the model of Playground.global, Andy Rubin's hardware-oriented VC firm, although you pay with extra equity at the common price.
There's also a "network effect" at play: because Toyota's are already plentiful, spare parts are easier to come by and much cheaper for Toyota compared to any other manufacturer, thus encouraging people to buy yet more Toyota's.
It's true that so far every step of the way we have found environmental factors that are generally in favor of life. However, there are still many factors we don't know anything about. Somewhere between the possibility of one of these remaining factors being extremely unfavorable to life and us just being in a very isolated location, there should be an explanation for the Fermi paradox we're actually experiencing.

Sensationalist title aside, the article actually plays it extremely safe, by asserting a very high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations having been existed somewhere in the past.

But even so, there are potential problems where that might conflict with observation. I'm not generally a fan of these "alien civilizations must construct huge machines and must have a huge energy output" assertions, however, all it would take is one of the previous civilizations to have built something we can recognize. Sadly, nothing has been found, neither artefacts such as probes, nor radiological evidence in the sky.

Now, there are many possible reasons for why we haven't found anything yet, first and foremost being that the galaxy is vast in both time and space. But if I forced myself to be especially pessimistic, I would say that the probability of abiogenesis might be way smaller than even our bleakest estimates.
Most fund agreements prohibit cross-fund investment, mainly because it's an incentive for fund n+1 to be used to prop up losing investments from fund n, deferring the day of reckoning.
OK, but most electric cars don't get their electricity from sunlight. So that's not a fair comparison either :)

Of course F1 cars are not an efficient means of transport. The point is that the new rules introduced constraints that have produced real innovation in efficiency, giving significant gains that could be utilized in passenger vehicles. This is the real news, not silly headlines like "F1 cars are more efficient than electric cars".
Apples and oranges. Dear author, please redo your argument with Formula One versus these race cars: http://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/
These are the EU mandated car safety checks, focusing on breaks, tires, lights, visibility and exhaust.

It is required every 2nd year starting from when the car is 4 years old.
Most car manufacturers will do this as part of the standard service interval anyway.
The horrible GUIs are just icing on the cake. It doesn't even take that much to design a passable GUI.
It seems that the probability of life appearing (in some form), given the ideal conditions, is higher than that of obtainiing the ideal conditions.
This might interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098146
This is a much better article:

http://www.motorsportmagazine.com/opinion/f1/ferraris-formul...

My understanding is that they pre-ignite a tiny amount of fuel in a special chamber, which forces the main fuel-air charge into the cylinder through targeted nozzles, making a very effective and targeted fuel air mixture, which can be leaner as the mix is so good.
> The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.

That's a very US-centric (or to be precise, Anglo-Saxon centric) statement. The vast majority of countries in the world uses a civil-law system instead of common-law system. In civil-law system, codes and statutes are designed and supposed to cover all edge cases and eventualities
Ooh, over a thousand kilometers you say? Yes, that's definitely much closer to the 300,000km a regular car engine achieves than the GP was suggesting.
It's a turbocharged hybrid engine with two electric motor-generator units. One on the shaft between the turbine and the compressor and the other is on the crankshaft.

Excess heat energy is captured from the turbo with the generator instead of blowing the excess out of the waste gate. The turbo is pre-spooled by turning it with the electric motor so the internal combustion engine runs at or near stoichiometric optimal fuel-air mix at all times.

The other motor generator does regenerative braking and can drive the engine.

The Mercedes engine is rumored to develop around 950 horsepower from the 1.6l V6 engine (of which about 160 are from the electric motors).

I'm hopeful that similar technology will find its way to road cars. City buses in particular would benefit a lot due to frequent stops.
This describes basically every town inside 128 around Boston, and the towns just outside 128 are mostly just a little more spread out. If you pick a town with a commuter rail stop, you can get more than 30 miles out of Boston and still have a reasonable public-transit commute to a job in the city proper.
Just below the water line at the beach, unfortunately.
>But most folks won't do this stuff. Most folks won't even get addicted.

That is absolutely true. I didn't say civilization will collapse or anything like that. I'm just saying there will be a price. There's certainly room for disagreement over how high the price will be. But I think it's pretty ridiculous to pretend ending drug prohibition will be free.

>Only that isn't really true either. Some of the campaigns to make them illegal were based in racism.

I don't find this compelling. Yes, there was a feeling of "Don't smoke pot - only jazz musicians smoke pot." But if you really thought only jazz musicians smoked pot there wouldn't be any reason to make it illegal. And if there were 88% of the country wouldn't tolerate prohibition just to oppress the other 12%.

>Misinformation was spread, both before and after. My grandmother thought pot would make people insane, for example.

Yes, that's true, though I think there's a big difference between marijuana and, say, opiods, amphetamines, or barbiturates.

>There are drugs that I think are bad for folks that take them and their families, but we could actually help folks and their families instead.

If you read up a bit you'll see I'm in basic agreement with you on the right way to move forward. I just think it's naive to believe people won't take more drugs in the margin, and we won't be dealing with some problems as a result. The hope (and my belief) is the new problems will be fewer than the old problems we're getting rid of by getting rid of drug laws.
The Lancet article says that one patient died of complications with the transplant procedure, and this was Phase 2. I'm in pharma, not stem cells, but if a patient died due to treatment, the project would be killed. Perhaps the transplant procedure is well-understood along with its risks (I assume you have to transplant into the CNS?), but even oncology drugs aren't allowed to kill patients anymore.
It's ironic that scrolling stutters so much on a Google Developers page when using Chrome on Android (51.0.2704.81). Inertial scrolling is broken too.

I rarely have this problem on other sites. It usually only occurs on Javascript heavy sites (disproportionately frequently on Google sites using that Material UI toolkit).

I'm using a Samsung S7, but had this same issue on my Nexus 6.
That's the compiler part that optimizes the elegance away :). The interesting part is here [1], note that it will work without any support from the compiler.

[1] - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f... and http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=smalltalk.git;a=blob;f...
In my experience, the main problem with ORMs is that they promote the tendency to reuse their model instances for business logic entities, meaning they become overly coupled with the persistence mechanism, namely SQL databases in this case. The architecture becomes much more flexible if the business logic is kept in an independent layer -- which may or may not be object-oriented -- which then uses ORM instance objects for interacting with the database.
>First on earth out of billions of species

That's par for the course. That's how evolution works. And we're also gonna be the last on earth (we or our evolved successors), because we have the evolutionary upper hand.

But that doesn't say much for other planets. We expect them too to have billions of species and a race to produce an intelligent being too.
True. That just comes with the territory, I'm afraid. It would be nice if there were a surrender option.
It's too expensive when you have multiple small static websites. I could host several of those on one DO droplet for $10/month, but with surge it will cost me $40+/month for 3+ projects (I do want SSL for my custom domain).
The output is not far off what what a Markov chain or "Dissociated press" (1) technique would make. I did one of those 20 years ago for fun in a few hours; it wasn't AI then.

1)

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

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/Dissociated-Press.html
They also provide plenty of support for drug users.

I'm not sure the same would be true in the US, seeing the piss-poor state of mental health treatment in the US.
You don't even have to specify an email address at all; it's considered optional in ACME.[0]

[0] https://github.com/ietf-wg-acme/acme/blob/master/draft-ietf-...
or a filesystem...
https://reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/
Not if you only give it one chance. Those are incredibly grim odds just for life - nevermind civilization, which would be rarer still - somehow arising.

But aren't those chances constantly being created, on the scale of uncountable -illions of interactions of molecules that happen every second, across the billions of square and cubic kilometers of the surfaces and oceans of those billions of planets, across billions of years?

I mean, doesn't that improve the odds just a little bit?
This new jet igniter you mention is a fairly new development (not all teams have it yet) and is no doubt beneficial but it's probably not a huge increase in the efficiency on top of the clever hybrid technology.

But it does provide a fair bit of power, and I'm looking forward to seeing Honda race it tomorrow for the first time (Mercedes and Ferrari have it already, Honda bringing it to Canada this weekend, not sure about Renault). This might improve McLaren's lackluster performance and even up the racing a little.
Also only 121 years old. Radio is a very recent phenomena on Earth.
Euro2016 – UEFA EURO 2016 results for hackers
I'm not sure I understand this comment. If they wanted $2 billion for the company, doesn't it mean that they refused the $300 million offer? Sounds to me like they wanted at least a billion dollars for what was essentially an IP acquisition.

I think whoever did their valuation, highly overvalued them. There's no way it would be worth that much unless they already had their own lithium mine or something. It's almost like those Shark Tank entrepreneurs that come and say "but our startup could be worth 20x as much in 10 years..so that's that's our valuation".
Even if we outcompeted the Neanderthals (or other very intelligent species), they were still very close to us in the tree of life (they were cousins). For a trait to be a high probability outcome of evolution it needs to happen independently in many different species - take binocular sight for instance which happens in all kinds of very far related species.

Even if our close relatives had similar intelligence and we outcompeted them, it's still safe to say that intelligence (as defined) appeared in only a small branch of the evolutionary tree.

Why don't we see species underwater building radio stations? There's lots of life diversity underwater and they certainly weren't in our "competing" ground (being underwater) so they could've developed intelligence independently... but didn't. That's my point.
Yes, I'd start with first-party funding making a difference.

E.g. why have lawyers of higher skills available based on their asking fees? That's like openly acknowledging that people with more money get better leverage on the law and have better representation.

If it was to me, I'd take that aspect out of the legal system. We might value such competition in business, but I sure as hell don't want it there -- it's what ensures millionaires get out with a slap on the wrist for dire offenses and poor people and minorities end up with disproportionate sentences.

Of course this would never fly (too much money to be lost), but e.g. making lawyer assignment random for everybody, or having the state demand a total specific cap on what they can charge that's the same for everybody.

In other words: stop allowing legal representation to be a market where more money buy you better services.
And, I don't think it's even correct that we are the only intelligent species on Earth. Most intelligent, yes. But, certainly not the only intelligent.
It would be great if you guys made a torrent out of the downloaded courses
Most people would consider their possibly/definitely having HIV to be a more personal piece of information than their email address.

If I'd been affected by this Let's Encrypt email thing I frankly wouldn't care, other than to question why it happened. (Just speaking for myself, I'm sure some people would care.) But if I was data in a leak revealing a personal serious medical issue, I absolutely would care.
After the demise of PowerPC in the general computing space, what did you expect would come of Intel hegemony? BS like this. An invisible, all powerful, potentially hackable layer between the chip core and the OS sold as something to ease remote administration and enforce DRM.
The 200K is not paid to the government but to the previous owner of the plate. So yes the price is dictated by demande/offer but you are true that by restricting the offer the are artificially raising the price of the plate.

When Uber started operating in Quebec the price of a plate in Montreal dropper to around 160K. That was the major point of dispute, since taxi drivers usually get loans to buy these plates knowing that they can re-sell then anytime. Uber changed that.
As soon as you get v1.0 life, it starts bioforming its environment.

v2.0 life would have to evolve in the changed environment - which would be considerably less hospitable, because the most useful chemical processes and energy sources will be colonised by v1.0 life.

v1.0 life will (more or less literally) get the low hanging fruit. v2.0 would have to evolve around the edges, which means the probability gradient is higher and therefore less likely.
>I often wonder if the only secure computing and communication these days is an air-gapped computer.

Some security experts say air-gapping is not the best approach. Consider Qubes OS instead.

"How does Qubes OS compare to using a separate physical machine?", https://www.qubes-os.org/tour/
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If they wanted to guarantee cash, they could've bought a collar by selling calls and buying puts. It would have a very small cost, and the deal's investment bankers could set it up, no problem.

tl;dr: you're both extremely confident, ignorant, and wrong.
Why compare stuff happening elsewhere that you don't know about (other planets) when you can compare stuff that you know about (here on earth?).

My point is that intelligent life as defined above seems not to be a certain development of evolution. I showcased the evidence for that. You seem to think that it is, but you didn't argue why - other than "it happens so it will for sure on other planets as well".

There are tons of other traits that are singular in the evolutionary tree, simply because they didn't stick for whatever reason. If intelligence was as common as binocular eyesight, say, then we'd see it appearing in all kinds of very different species.
Does ME still access the network if you don't connect anything to the Intel network card, but use a different network card instead?
That all happened 15 years ago. The article mentions that it's available at some hospitals, so that suggests it was ultimately successful and it's now part of regular medicine. I suppose it's still only for 5% of cases and only as a last resort and still most patients aren't having any reversal of their disease. There doesn't sound like much hope for it to expand to cure MS in general given how long it's been with apparently no further progress.
I wish there were a clear separation between passive surveillance and active.

I'd be happier if the NSA merely analyzed signals coming from foreign nations, rather than trying to penetrate the networks of said nations - even if it's North Korea.

If I were someone working for the NSA, I would not feel like a "good guy". Maybe I'm just a naive young person who hasn't lived through the brutality of a world war to know why this penetration is necessary.

I equate this to invading a foreign country. I don't feel good -- as a citizen -- waking up in this country knowing this goes on.
Wise Russians downloaded most of them already:

http://imgur.com/rdPhclR
http://imgur.com/MzQesnK
http://imgur.com/9iN21V7

(from https://rutracker.org/forum/tracker.php?nm=Coursera)
I've actually written FORTRAN on a CDC 6600, at Dalhousie University. The algorithm was probably written in assembler (COMPASS) for speed. The 6600 had a 60-bit register, advanced for its time. The cabinets had some real cool glass panels. The console was two futuristic vector CRTs.
That was a good read. I'd be interested to see the author address trademarks and branding, because that's where you find the intersection of identity (rivalrous in her thesis) and the creative arts (non-rivalrous).

The author states that cultural works increase in value the more they are shared. At the risk of debating semantics ("shared", "value") — would Disney still be a $50B company if anyone had been allowed to release a Mickey Mouse cartoon?
Just in case anyone is wondering -- though at this point, isn't it your first guess? -- the stem cells used in this therapy were adult stem cells, meaning they were collected from her own body, as opposed to embryonic stem cells.

I mention it here because the article doesn't give that info until about half-way down.
Bad scene.
Are you suggesting that most cars get their electricity from nuclear-powered plants? Because gas, coal, oil and even most hydroelectric energy all are in some form powered by sunlight.
In the study, the patients' immune systems were cleansed of the agent or agents that caused the autoimmune response. The agent might be present from birth; no one knows what it is, even today. Thus, unfortunately, banking stem cells and restoring them to the body might have the opposite effect of a cure.

If they can figure out how to isolate only the specific agents that trigger the attacks on myelin, that would obviously be a huge step forward.
I will stand up and be prickly here and say: please do not judge the world by your (apparently) Apple-centric circumstance.

I (personally) am a nomad. I can not carry 27 computers with me. My world would be best served by having one computer that does all the jobs. Apple hinders me in this; it does not help.

Yes, I can (and do) do Hackintosh VMs, but it makes me feel dirty.

Whenever I have to deploy on an iphone, to test I buy a bank of iphones (and give them to the neighborhood children when I am done). That should be good enough.
http://harvey-os.org/news/#clang-intel-c-compiler-apex-and-z...
Miller 4.1: for/if/while and various features
One is welcome to suggest improvements but to reject on that they owe more is BS anti science, it's politics.
>If you don't trust Intel then you don't trust Intel.

Security is not a boolean. It's a price to own you. By removing Intel ME you increase this price.