skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.

1 in 10 billion trillion at first seems like such an incomprehensibly low probability that our first gut reaction is, "Well then of course there's no way it could be the case."

But then we must bear in mind that abiogenesis (the creation of life from non-life) might consist of a series of independent events, each of which is improbable. And guess how you figure out the probability of all of those events occurring:

P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B)

So, what's 1 in 10 billion trillion? 10^-22?

Well, if you have a mere eight improbable things that must all occur, and each has a probability of 1 in 1,000, the total probability is now at 10^-24.

Hmm, 10^-22 doesn't seem quite as incomprehensibly low anymore, does it?

Aside from that, we really have to think hard about what probability means in the context of the snippet quoted above.

As statistician to the stars William M. Briggs points out, "There just is no such thing as unconditional probability, or probability without respect to any evidence."

Because we have insufficient evidence to establish what the frequency of abiogenesis is, the quoted snippet basically could be rephrased:

For all we know, the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet could be 10^-22 or 10^-222 or 10^-2222, and if it's less than 10^-22 then we are not the first.

Isn't it strange that in a certain sense, the probability of each of those probabilities being correct is essentially the same, given our current insufficient level of evidence?
Yes and no, I suppose. I consider myself to be a pretty good employee, but I know that I would struggle a lot working remotely. Someone who's used to working remotely probably has that discipline, but for now, I know I lack it.
That's interesting to hear, since we're launching a quarterly of stories in 2017, as a classic magazine.

It will be digital and paper (comic book/pulp format to evoke the Amazing Stories feel), but we really wanted to get paper magazines out there for that same tangibility.
I don't really see how it could be missing terms. Chance of A. Chance A becomes B. Chance B becomes C. etc. It's intentionally very simple, with very broad terms. It should have no gaps by definition, unless there was a wording error.
Former Scuba dev, Okay Zed, wrote http://snorkel.logv.org/. It's open source.
not to mention that people play differently with fake money than real money.
If Tesla gets their way then hopefully this will change.

Buying our 85D was just a matter of sitting down with the rep at a Mac in-store and ordering from TeslaMotors.com. The most painless car buying experience I've ever had. We could have done it from our house if we wanted to.

[edit]

I should add that we've done the whole "pit 2-3 dealerships against each other over email with exact spec" before and while it does get you a good deal, it takes a ton of time and requires you to be willing to walk away and waste an evening if they pull any funny business.
Working at the office isn't about floor plan or seat time.

Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment.

It doesn't matter if you are in an office with the door closed, or working from home: either way you miss things that you should have been told directly but nobody thought to tell you. So you end up doing otherwise great work that it leading the project in the wrong direction.

That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely. Thus when you are working from home you lose a lot of opportunities to do what is needed as opposed to what you are told. People who can figure out the right thing and do that are more valuable than people who only do what they are told.

Note that the title is correct: all employees should be trusted to work remotely from time to time. However that does not mean you should work from home all the time. You should be a regular at the office so that you don't lose touch. At the first sign of illness (you or your kids), bad weather, or a hard no interruptions problem: you should be out of the office and working from home. However you should also be a regular at the office for the benefits of being at the office.

Of course this depends on your job. If you are a contractor you might be in a situation where you do the letter of the contract and are gone - the only time you might want to do something else is if you are trying to turn the contract into a full term position. Even then though, some contracts are get release N out the door, with a possibility of renewal for release N+1 - in that case you may have the option to change what is in release N.
One other proposed factor: the laws of physics may vary across the universe, so stars in faraway galaxies may not be eligible. But there's a lot of evidence that the laws of physics are the same as far away as we can see, so this seems unlikely to me.

There are good reasons to believe that intelligent civilizations are short lived (compared to cosmological time scales). So the absence of radio signals from nearby planets doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to send a probe there to see if there are ruins or something.
> But if your body doesn't adjust after a week of going to bed at 11pm

That's not the problem. The problem is getting to sleep before 2am after having gone to bed at 11pm. My general answer has been 6+ alarms in the morning, lots of morning caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks, and small-to-medium amounts of sleep deprivation to "fix" that issue (accepting a certain baseline level of exhaustion to enable me to fall asleep at 11pm.) It works, but it's far from optimal. I'm not going to whine about it on a day-to-day basis - that would be petulant - but I am going to feign mock horror and incredulity about the existence of morning people, if only for my own amusement. I'm not going to pretend it's not a thing.

Recently, I cut back to near-zero caffeine - as I've done many times before - and found myself naturally adjusting to a morning-biased, 24 hour schedule - for the first time in decades. This was such a startling change that I'm only half joking when I say I thought about seeing a doctor. But I imagine this is merely what life has been like for, say, the likes of you - all along. Perfectly natural. Nothing to panic about.
Significant Moments in PGP's History
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13433029
Firm fixed price (essentially cost plus). I checked with several other dealers and no one else was willing to go as low as the fixed price I was offered.
I think the title must be
"Chrome 56 will mark non-HTTPS pages with password fields as non-secure"
I don't mind the aforementioned abbrevations, but I think certain choices — "fn" in particular — make poor "visual anchors".

Rust generally suffers from a Perl-like visual clutter, caused by a proliferation of punctuation (I have a particular hatred for "::") and also the unfortunate choice of snake_case for identifiers. Some of these things work in Ruby and Python because they're otherwise very uncluttered languages, but in Rust they only exacerbate the noisiness. (As a minor aside, it's always bothered me that almost all snakecase languages don't Capitalize_Like_This, so they're not symmetrical here. Oh, well.)

The Rust devs always bite back when I complain about the above. I know they put a lot of thought into it; I just think they could have put in more. The visual aspect of code is almost always underestimated by language designers.

(On a semi-related note, I really like how Facebook's Reason cleans up OCaml's syntax.)
Communication seems to be optional.
Obviously, my message was slightly provocative, deep learning methods and classical controls (which by the way are able to quantify robustness to plant uncertainties and noisy signals) are all very useful but shall be used in combination. End-to-end techniques that bundle perception, planning and control in an opaque net are fun to play with (like in this article), it just very sad to see people believing this produces robust and safety-critical systems and we see too much of such articles on HN.
I stopped using TrueCaller because not only this app gets everything out of your phonebook, it puts it on the web for others to see. And that's exactly how you see other's contact details too.

Uninstalled after deactivating my account and then used https://www.truecaller.com/unlist but my number is still listed.
It's concerning that the paper was never released.
Seems like fallout shelters...where do I apply to be an overseer?
Yes, this is the kind of task computers should "compete with" - using weak and semireliable motor functions and cheap cameras (no infrared or laser vision etc) and making up for it with "smarts" - the way humans do.
http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=c2dc3c7e7691816d126...
Antennas are coupled. Transmitting is receiving, and receiving is transmitting.

When you pull on a chain or a rope, it doesn't matter if the other side is "receiving" the pull, or "sending" it. The two sides are physically coupled.

Similarly, antennas are physically coupled to each other. Increase the gain on one side, the other side still benefits. You're physically connecting a "rope" of electrons over the air.
There's some really weird downvoting going on here. It seems that all the comments that suggest some practical, if not ideal, way to deal with the current dealership setup are being downvoted to obscurity. Who would want to downvote these? Car dealers? People who are certain that the current setup has no redeeming qualities?

Of course eventually some corrective upvoting like I've applied already will fix the imbalance for some of these wrongfully-downvoted comments. Perhaps even parent, making this comment look silly. However this is still a phenomenon that has occurred on this page, so I thought I'd point it out.
> It's more common than you think. Many poorer populations don't trust or understand banking, or work under the table. Either way, they stash pipes of cash.

If you're poor, you're probably not stashing tens of thousands in cash. I bet the percentage of people who both qualify as poor and have $10K in cash on hand is low single digits.

> It's not uncommon for these folks to make huge cash deposits to buy a car or whatever.

Why would you deposit $10K to buy a car instead of carrying your cash to the car dealer? Also, why are you buying a car that costs >$10K if you're poor?
Exactly. And yes, a "sufficiently smart compiler" [1] could have discovered the optimization, the old and new methods are semantically equivalent. It would be interesting to test a superoptimizer on this, but I suspect it wouldn't go very far because superoptimizers usually operate at the basic block level (this has a branch) and optimize for number of instructions, not bytes.

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler
I'd prefer books given a choice but I'm too poor to own a house where l live so a non-kindle e-reader is my saviour.
It really, really, really depends on where you're interviewing though.

Remember Google infamously rejecting Max Howell, the original Homebrew author? I know there has to be more to the story, but he's become the poster child for talented programmers getting rejected because they can't play the interview game. My point is, though, that his side project absolutely had a huge impact and it still wasn't enough.

90% of my interviews have been a take-home project followed by a chat going through my history and experience; in fact, my small side projects and hackathon projects tend to impress interviewers more than my on-the-spot abilities or my work history. Interestingly, I worked for a Fortune 500 bank and, while it was the least-challenging job I've had, the interview process was by far the hardest and had a few questions straight out of CCTI.

Research a few companies. Their Glassdoor pages usually indicate what kind of interview process they have. Then prepare accordingly.
Several counter-ancedata to your ancedata isn't evidence?

EDIT, in case it isn't:

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

> Between 10% and 30% of adults have insomnia at any given point in time and up to half of people have insomnia in a given year.[3][5][11] About 6% of people have insomnia that is not due to another problem and lasts for more than a month.[3] People over the age of 65 are affected more often than younger people.[7] Females are more often affected than males.[5] Descriptions of insomnia occur at least as far back as ancient Greece.[12]

Just medicate the problem, right?

> While sleeping pills may help, they are associated with injuries, dementia, and addiction.[8][9] Medications are not recommended for more than four or five weeks.[9] The effectiveness and safety of alternative medicine is unclear.[8][9]

Oh. Hmm.
I disagree. From the Christian perspective there would be lots of questions to be asked, like if the aliens have original sin and if there is a duty to teach them the Gospel. These questions have already been debated in theory so I would imagine encountering an actual alien civilization would popularize them.
Wouldn't a course of action be to forbid Symantec from letting their partners issue certificates using their intermediate CAs? That would probably mean that Symantec would have to pay compensation to their partners for being forced to breach their contract.
I don't believe it's healthy for democracy.

FDR was exceptional but a large part of why he was reelected was because of ongoing events. In any other situation he would not have. The American people after his death wisely decided it wasn't good for someone to have power for 13+ years. That turns the office into something imperial. Packing the court was an abuse of power that he was only able to attempt because he was popular, and popularity isn't always the best way to pick leaders.

Other incredible presidents didn't get three terms (Roosevelt comes to find). Obama has at best been a good president. Does he really deserve 12 years? Is he more deserving of that than all other presidents but FDR? Historically, no. And without the rule, he'd get it by default as he's obviously better than Trump and incumbent advantage and all that.

Without term limits we're just waiting for the bizarro Nixon in Watchmen to show up...and given time it would happen. Maybe Trump would be it.
Do you have any recommendations for the best CSCI 101 books to read?
Hi, i would like to draw the attention of you, the people with more expertise than I to another app that at least for me is more terrifying Xiaomi Mi Fit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xiaomi.hm....), because it also takes all the intrusive permissions (modify system settings?!), but also takes all this info and combines it with your health data. Furthermore it is very hard to find it's privacy policy (I may have seen it once during registration in the app and it said "it's scattered around the terms and aggreements). This comment may be burried, but I hope at least someone, who's better in this than I will check it
I'm not a military guy, but was surprised that the weapons-free, kill-anything-that-moves zone described in the article could exist in today's warfare. Turns out it kindof doesn't.

After some quick reading, [1] a "kill box" is still subject to the standard rules of engagement. Its purpose was to make sure everyone is aiming at the same stuff, and to make resupply/logistics work smoothly, not to lift fire restrictions.

Maybe the tactic was abused to circumvent ROE in practice, but the intent seems clear.

[1]: DoD publication: https://info.publicintelligence.net/MTTP-KillBox.pdf
I don't think I ever signed anything like that. But since I didn't find out what had happened until much later, there was plenty of time for memories to fade.
Netflix VPN Crackdown, a Year of Frustrations
I mean...I guess arrows are reusable and much more easily created by hand than bullets? I guess?
It doesn't appear to actually have changed in the iOS app store as of this writing.
Wow, Javascript, really? I am guessing you don't actually work with NPM a lot.
C++ creator wants to solve 35-year-old generic programming issues with Concepts
XT Audio Beacons
First images from new weather satellite
I agree.

Getting shit done - the actual, hands in the works, not managing or brainstorming - however, is not a collaborative activity. At some point you have to sit down and focus, and other people are a menace then.
For anyone who, like me, still couldn't see the bloody cow:

https://boldquestions.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/cow-outlin...
I'm off finding a suitable Android build for this company issued S6 Edge.
Oh .. wait.

In other words: Some devices are more equal than others, Android isn't a really open platform and your suggestion, while something I personally sympathize with, is impossible in general. :/
Money is a decoupling mechanism. An interface.
As a current Fi user and former Voice user, I'm still unclear on the relationship between the two. Hangouts for Mac still rings when I get a phone call, but I can't answer the call.
I don't think any modern academic writing guide recommends this; almost every piece of advice I've seen tries to emphasize writing in the active voice.

You don't have to write in passive voice to be rigorous; I'm guessing the OP was talking about this lack of rigour.
Well I'm sure you started drawing with some goal in mind, even if it was "a more enjoyable way to spend my time." Personally, I like the term "purpose" more than "goal". The underlying WHY gives context and meaning to our daily actions. You draw for a reason. Knowing that (putting your attention on it), makes your habit even more rewarding.
BoringSSL and LibreSSL are two non-trivial projects to improve SSL libraries that started within the last 2 years. They may not be at an ideal state yet, but a lot of work is being done to move the baseline to a better state.
But really? I live in Europe and I'm still not able to order a Google Voice number... and god damn, I tried. I move between countries very regularly, having a single international number would be fantastic.

I've essentially stopped using hangouts anyway. Everybody I talked to on there is on Discord now (https://discordapp.com/). Screenshare and video calls coming soon to it too, at which point I'll permanently log off Hangouts. If I'm going to use a proprietary system, it might as well not suck.
> He also tried to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s.

In his second term. So, hardly a dangerous protection re against by term limits.

> He had an inordinate amount of power

As the failure of the court packing scheme demonstrates, he didn't have an "inordinate amount of power" personally, he was just, on other issues, successful at convincing others with power that his preferred approaches were desirable.
Getting Started with DC/OS and Vagrant
State of Apple from two perspectives
One of my problems is finding junior jobs. It seems whenever I go searching I see only mid-senior level jobs
International SMS support plz.
The most productive time I've had has been hobbies that I enjoyed and was passionate about that involved human interaction. I'm an introvert by nature, and thus somewhat disinclined to socialize to the same extent as more extroverted people.

When I was younger, I was far from the best at interacting with people, but hobbies, and forums and groups surrounding them connected me to people who shared similar interests and helped me interact with them. Through shared passions and enjoyment, I developed better social skills, reduced anxiety, and built life long friendships and relationships.
There is a great advantage to an e-Reader (like Kindle) in that you can turn any book into a large print book. As you get older and you eyesight gets worse this is no small advantage, since you can continue reading the stuff you like.

There are some magazines (looking at you New Republic) that we stopped subscribing too because the font is too small to read - I can still see it, but trying to read it causes eye strain.
If one must attempt to salvage the idea of divine creation in such desultory fashion, why not assume that the aliens are the intentional created creatures of the divine, and we are just the random evolutionary accidents?
What do you hope to achieve with such a reply, other than signalling that you hate Trump (which is a rather common sentiment here, so go you)?

At no point did they argue that this makes Trump good or even acceptable, and in fact they specifically mentioned things about Trump that scare them. I found the comment to be thoughtful and nice in light of this rather gloomy situation. Sometimes it's important to celebrate good things without yelling at each other.

I'm sorry for coming across as singling you out on this, but please don't consider the next paragraph aimed at you specifically.

The single thing that has bothered me most during this entire election is how both Trump voters and Hillary voters spent so much time basically yelling at each other in tribal fashion. My Facebook feed was dominated by mostly pro-Hillary people who decried anyone even remotely agreeing with Trump as racist, misogynist, rural uneducated shits, and a a pro-Trump person or two who kept posting about emails and pizza-related tinfoil hat theories (and that coming from someone who generally speaking is considered a bit of a conspiracy theorist). I know for a fact that a large portion of these posts served absolutely no good purpose I could imagine other than 'virtue signalling'.

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I had to pick a side I'd be in the Hillary camp. I have opinions too.

And sometimes I've expressed them in ways and places where it mostly just benefited me as a person somehow. I'm not perfect. But it frustrates me to no end to see people just yelling at each other. It seems less of an issue in my real-world interactions, but then my real world consists of people who mostly agree with me.

Without targeting you specifically, I really hope everyone here, myself included, can avoid being part of the screaming mobs. One of my favorite things about this place is that it still often challenges my thinking (I'm less of a functional programming zealot, and one of my new year's resolutions is to give emacs a real shot, for example), and I really hope we can at the very least bring some of this quality even to political discussions, because we do have a lot more influence than we think.
The good would now be subsidized.
This is what I like to call "ambient communication". It's like water of the company life - too much of it and you drown, too little and you get ill and disoriented.
This is very confusing.
This is not surprising to me at all. I tried a ton of notes and todo list tracking apps and they all sucked for one reason or another and always ended up in not being the right tool for the job.

Eventually, my friend and I ended up designing our own notebooks and crafting our initial prototypes by hand until we came up with something that we use everyday.

It's up for sale on Amazon and we have a lot of happy customers. It's not changing the world and we aren't VC backed or anything fancy like that, but it's great to make something real that people love to use.

If you're curious about any of the process, I'd be happy to answer any questions and if you want to check out the notebooks they are available here... https://www.amazon.com/Unbranded-Pocket-Notebook-3-pack-Note...