skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If an alien civilization existed, but we can never find any evidence of it existing, does it still count?

The speculation is moot as long as the record of evidence cannot support within a reasonable confidence interval that only one or more alien civilizations could have produced it.

Guessing with the Drake equation only helps to determine just how much time and funding you would like to provide to projects like SETI, that actually watch for and listen for evidence that would refute the null hypothesis (viz. no civilizations anywhere outside of Sol System).

All the article really says is that if SETI has enough resources to watch the entire sky at maximum resolution for an infinite timespan, it will eventually find something. But I'm certainly not going to sink that much time and money into it. I'd rather put that money into generation ships, sleeper ships, robotic seed ships, permanent space habitats, or some combination thereof.
Global Visa Requirements Map
> I've already told all my friends to forget my Google Voice number.

Why didn't you migrate your GV number? That seems a lot less painful than telling everyone to update your contact information.
I get the most work done when I am the only one in the office, So I tend to take my lunch at a different schedule than my co workers, come in early, stay late, and take work home because during "normal" business hours is a constant stream of "collaboration" that interrupts me doing any actual work.

I love flu season, because I normally do not get sick, and everyone else is out of the office sick... sooo peaceful.

I would love to work remotely, only interacting with people remotely.
Great, they now face regulatory and reputational risks, and rightly so.

They should be allowed to take steps to prevent themselves from unwittingly supporting laundering, terrorism, etc.

However, those steps should not include STEALING THEIR CUSTOMERS' MONEY, which is no less than this bank did until contacted by the media.

If they decide the person or transaction is insufficiently verifiable to accept, hold, or move the money, fine. Refuse to keep the funds and RETURN THEM TO THE OWNER. Keeping the funds is simply theft.

This is no better than the "asset forfeiture" going on in US police departments who are behaving as robbery gangs.
Get a google fi account and don't put the SIM in a phone (besides perhaps to activate the first time).

Then you get full featured texts and voice calling in gmail and the hangouts app. It'll cost $20/mo.
> So have you stuck with this?

For the past 2 weeks, at least. It is very strange.

> I think I may - possibly through my own hyperbole - given the impression that I'm some sort of narcoleptic unicorn that can sleep on command

No, but you've given the impression that you at least have it more under control than I've had it. I mentioned 6+ alarms earlier - this is not hyperbole, there have been times when it's been a regular thing, and on more than one occasion I have slept through them all. Rather embarrassing.

> But, like you, I've got it under control mainly through common sense.

I'm not sure what I've done qualifies as common sense. The amount of sugary energy drinks I've consumed (hating coffee) cannot in any way be considered healthy - I'm lucky my family isn't prone to diabetes, and that the headaches only last a couple days when going cold turkey. While my constitution can bare it, what I've done would probably kill others. The sleep deprivation is not healthy either. I've controlled it, yes - but at what cost?

> At no point did I ever feel like it was my employer that had the problem because they expected me there at 9am.

I don't see it as a blame thing. But I've had employers offer "core hours" that didn't start until 11am, and taken advantage of that as a nice common sense perk that balances the need for collaboration and people's different schedules in what's hopefully a win for both myself (better health and happiness) and the company (better productivity).

All other things equal between two job offers, and I will absolutely take the one with more flexible hours. And I will continue to do so even if I somehow end up permanently transforming into not-a-night-owl - because there will be times I get stressed, drink too many energy drinks, etc. etc. - and I would argue that this is the common sense choice for both me and for my employer.
But to be able to decouple the vision pipeline you need a lot of manual annotation work which is tedious.
I just looked that up because I couldn't believe it. What? It's so ham fisted!
I work with NPM everyday, and it works swimmingly. npm install packagename --save, doesn't get much easier than that.
I'm working on my second million.

I gave up on my first million.....
He is, and Xiomi is (he said) a customer. He's in sales and just didn't expect as much revenue from Xaoimi as some of the other up and coming vendors. Sorry I don't remember the names but he raved about the styling and build quality of one.

Usual disclaimers: single data point / anecdote; I've known him for 15 years or so.
You don't need to sync Drive to your own storage. I don't. Do Dropbox and Office require that?
This is a ten year old book, but describes a lot of the early UI work. Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. It is an anthology of early papers with commentary.

Any of Donald Norman's books would provide an expanded view of UI design.
what type of work? development?
Right, but it's a lot nicer than going in and dealing with people in person. You can even do it by e-mail, so you avoid all that awkwardness. Just another option people may not have thought of.
https://mingw-w64.org/ is actively developed, whereas MinGW appears to be dormant.
That's the first time I've seen a VS user praise MSBuild, which is utter garbage. On the unix side you won't hear much praise for GDB or LLDB, but for everything you've listed numerous tools exist. Eclipse in particular has superior code indexing/navigation capabilities. Both QT and GTK have GUI builders. NVidia provides a plugin to debug and profile GPU code.

What Microsoft compiler doesn't provide in my experience is decent codegen.
Exclusive code ownership: why it’s bad and what to do with it
I really don't see a scenario working where you pay money to someone to protect you in a doomsday scenario working. The guard is the guy with the guns (and the training to use them). Why would the guard not just kill you/kick you out of the secure place once shit hits the fan?
Oh, absolutely not. But I hope my car would.
There's more to working from home than the worker.

Sometimes the management team or coworkers can't work well with remote workers. There are lots of reasons for this, both good and bad.
You can port your number from Voice to Fi, you just can't use both on the same account.
Hey everyone. I'm Kale, currently the lead developer on the conda project. It's been mentioned a few times in this thread, and I just want to make sure that any questions about it are answered accurately. Feel free to ask me anything about product conda. Thanks!
Whereas in British English, they're just "spacemen"!
> A useful starting date is 1830

I'd consider as the reasonable starting date, when we discuss about the alien civilizations on the distant planets, the day the radio communication starts to exist.

So we're some just for some 110 years capable of sending and receiving any radio message. If we move to the "capable of receiving the faint message from the big distance" it's more like just some 60-something years.

Also note that as we move to using the digital, high-density, compressed and especially encrypted messaging, the transmitted messages look more like the noise than the signal.
That's only true for countries with small economies. If the US, China, Japan or the Eurozone collapsed, that would plunge the whole world into a depression.
Yeah, I had a hard time understanding what the author was trying to say (and I have a PhD in Biophysics and work with QC all the time).
Ah, I think that I elected to use the native Messages app rather than Hangouts on Android for SMS. This may be the root of my issue.

I found hangouts on Android tough to use for SMS.
This could, and should, be used for every president.
It has clearly been created to prove Trump in particular won't (or will, who knows) hold his promises, but the execution is actually pretty great and is definitively applicable to any other president. Or political figure for what it's worth
Basic antenna question: I thought with Yagis the elements where connected together, is that not the case? As they seem to be held just by plastic.
I think this is an Android problem and not specific to Fi. On Android when the phone rings every process on the device absolutely freaks out.

THE PHONE IS RINGING OMG OMG INTERPROCESS MESSAGE BUS TRAFFIC!!!!!!1111111ONE

The process that plays the sound that rings your phone is just another process fighting it out with all the other ones for CPU time. Sometimes it loses.
From the article: One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.”
It's partly because the process is so painful; they throw a curveball at you after you've been to the dealership for 3 hours. At that point you start thinking "do I want to spend another painful 3 hours at a different dealership that is more than an hour drive away rather than just suck it up and spend $500 on something I don't need or want"
I boosted my Google Voice number out of Google Voice and into T-Mobile.

Took like 30 minutes.

Secondly, the Google Hangouts app had effectively replaced Google Voice for years. I think picture messages worked there no problem.
> This is a bit unfair when the company we're talking about goes out of its way to recruit and relocate skilled workers from overseas to Korea, knowing than most will never have the time or motivation to learn the language to a professional level.

This is correct, except it's often not the people (generic) you end up having comm difficulities with who made the strategic recruitment decision, which is why things don't work out all the way down. Language barrier and not wanting to put up with it is a legitimate way to want to get out, personally, but I sometimes hear the complaint publically voiced in a way that's at least unempathetic (e.g. toward the amount of stress and embarassment being required to speak English can cause Korean employees). Which then creates follow-on strife like Koreans complaining to me that "Americans are arrogant and only want to speak English wherever they go", and so on, and so forth, which puts me in an awkward spot.

It's best to go in expecting a language barrier, and doing the reversed-roles thought experiment helps.
Oracle lays off more than 1,000 employees
Encryption will make a signal look like noise, but first you have to be able to separate that source from the host star, and I think even doing that is difficult. I think that's the more fundamental problem.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to add the container removal and naming as new features.

You can indeed run all the commands easily just with Docker.
Cage aims to port all the functionalities from virtualenv to use Docker. After this is achieved I can start working on extending those functionalities.
> 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.

Can confirm, agreed on a price, the dealer wanted $3,500 for a pinstripe at the last minute. Had to walk, went to another dealership 40 miles away, got an agreement on the original deal negotiated with the original dealer, new dealer didn't have the car in stock, so the car I wanted to buy in the first place was shipped 40 miles to the new dealer. And I watched the new dealer's salesman peeled off the $3,500 pinstripe with his fingers before I'd take possession of the car.

Then after all the paperwork was signed, and I handed over a check for the full purchase price of the car, the new dealer refused to hand over the keys until I paid a $500 etching fee, and the saleperson re-etched the VIN in the car windows over the top of the VIN already etched in the car windows.

Fuck dealers.
Is there a comparison to scuba?
I visited Fog Creek in NYC once and as you know Joel Spolsky is a very big advocate on giving devs a good work environment. However he is also a big advocate of hiring good people no matter where they live. They had a policy that they had to discuss everything in chat or teleconference from what I saw. They said that despite being a door or 2 down from someone they wanted to talk to the forum of discussion had to be online for the sake of the remotes too.

If it isn't like this (and most places aren't like that) you are going to miss out on things when not in the office.
Cloud computing, is another attempt in a long line to consolidate network resources. It was attempted, and failed, with X terminals, network computers, java stations, etc.

Those that want to throw their hands up and give up on managing their network, data, and security by pushing it out to someone else to manage it thinking "it's cheaper and I can fire most of my IT staff" well that is their choice.

I wouldn't surrender my security to google or amazon at any cost, let alone the plundering of your data as they mine the hell out of it for whatever they can get.

I've never been a fan of this thinking and I never will be. I am a dinosaur.
Ask HN: I have 1 hour to introduce AI to high schoolers
What should I say to get them excited about pursuing the field in college and beyond?

The group is from a magnet high school for engineering and computer science.
I also switched from Voice to Fi and it's technically a VoIP number transferred to the Fi MVNO... Not sure why that fails the VoIP test, I'm paying for normal phone service but it's not legit enough???
Facebook Messenger, Duo, SMS and Hangouts are offered by different companies. The reason people are so baffled by Google's messaging apps is that there are six of them from one company, with no coherent explanation as to why. Even if I want to go "all in" on Google services, how do I know what to use?
Fake news’ power to influence shrinks with a contextual warning
I think he means "any given government" not "all governments". Like, if the government collapses in Venezuela, Bitcoin holders there will still have their purchasing power preserved.
You'd probably just be fine spending a few hours per week working on a MOOC that covers the fundamentals of algorithms and data structures like the ones on Coursera by Bob Sedgewick.

Other fundamental courses might include ones on Computer Networking or Databases like those offered by Stanford Lagunita.

Just keep a list of MOOCs that start regularly (like once a quarter or twice a year) or the self-paced ones and just rotate through them as review.
Yes. I'd love to see this for England. Not just for the party who gets in, but for the opposition too. They said all this in their manifesto; here's how they voted.
I work with a person like this now. He actually doesn't delegate a great deal despite being a project lead. He snows people with jargon, is often late to meetings, rarely comes into the office, and has produced no usable contributions in years. If I had acted as he does at any of my previous jobs, I would have been fired.

I truly don't understand why he still has his position. The sad thing is that he'll probably get promoted.
I mean, there are plenty of programming jobs with flex hours out there.
The right to stop them? Of course not. They have the obligation of providing a telephone for it to happen.
You're only making up excuses.
Oh cool, I actually hadn't seen pyenv before. Looks like it does indeed solve my problems (from a glance anyway, though I didn't see anything about pip in the readme).
Why did google mess up messaging in the first place? It seemed like this space was ripe for their taking. (Basically, just replicate the gmail concept for messaging. Keep it sorta-open-enough and free enough. Seems like a no-brainer.)

I mean, what was the specific root cause?
I had the same positive experience until I got a Nexus 6P and decided to try Fi (living in a remote area w/ only wi-fi). The new phone and services were outright hostile to Voice, so I created a new number and left voice alone. Really glad I did, but it will probably be a year before I start handing out the voice number again.
Working from home was removed from our office because of "abuse".

Who was "abusing" it?

We have 7 Indian (not American) females working in our office in various functions. All (100%) of them were found to have been "working" from home on multiple occasions where they were inaccessible (not logged in, not responding to emails). Their reasons for working from home ranged from children to car troubles. By all measurable attributes, their work output was less than their peers.

Now before you knee jerk, please understand that I'm simply pointing out the measurable facts of the situation. I'm not making any claims regarding cultural background. I am, however, questioning whether or not there exists a cultural component here that leads to a different understanding of the "work from home policy". To that degree, the statement, "If you don't trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn't have hired them" can perhaps come across as a bit racist.
The water supply was state-governed. The Flint City Council voted to approve switching water sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_t...
This article is extremely misleading. The author is a professor at the University of Strasbourg, so he knows what he's talking about; however, he words things in a weird way in an attempt to confirm some kind of overarching point that experimental chemistry is still necessary (which seems kind of obvious IMO).

Quantum mechanics can and does predict every element on the periodic table. Whether we can calculate what it predicts at the present time is a different matter entirely. In the words of Peter Gill, "The field of quantum chemistry has become an applied mathematics problem". Yes, it's well-known that naïve quantum chemistry fails to predict experimental results for a variety of reasons, but all of these reasons come back to the fact that we had to use approximations to solve difficult equations that otherwise could not be solved. If our predictions failed in some way fundamental to QM/QFT, every theoretical physicist alive would be shocked — it would be the biggest news in the field in over a century.

As better and better numerical approximation schemes are developed, the current issues with quantum chemistry will begin to disappear. Some people argue there are fundamental limits on what a classical computer can discover about quantum chemical systems, but then others argue that quantum computing will surmount these barriers (and others argue that it won't).
Boom completes wind tunnel testing, begins supersonic airplane construction
To play devils advocate: How can you have a ROWE, if you can't really measure engineer productivity? This just seems to lead back to the most lines of code added = most work done attitude.

This is a problem with traditional butts-in-seats as well of course, but (one could argue) less so, as your employees at least have to spent X hours trying to solve the problem. And if you already going to spent so much time, why not do it right.
I have now bought two cars through a broker, in my case "Autoland". I got a price over email, we chatted on the phone to confirm, they delivered the car to credit union where we signed papers on the pre approved loan. No bullshit, took 45 minutes I think to transfer the car, which was exactly to spec. Will never buy a car any other way.
Scientists create a 3D bioprinter to print human skin
Sounds like a good way to turn the galaxy into grey goo.
I'm saying I don't see any clear indication that they have the skills, whether or not they apply them.
how do you get it? I've had an account there a long time and see nothing allowing IMAP config.
I take apart the router, and get a valid certificate

You only get a valid certificate for your router's address. But if you can take apart the router, you don't need to hijack the DNS, you can simply control its traffic.

But if you're a guest in my home and I see you take apart my router, you'll have to answer a few questions. Same in an office or coffeshop. Having LAN access doesn't mean you have complete physical control of the router. So the HTTPS is not useless.
There are still other issues in China like

- censorship

- bad access to world internet

- corruption

- zenophobia/racism

- bad manners/behaviors from locals

- no weed

- food delicacies (mexican guacamole, european chocolate, real cheeseburger, etc)
First, I would agree it's very difficult now days to raise children on a single income but if it's a priority I know it can be done because my family is a data point.

But you've touched on something that could get me talking for hours... Namely, the detrimental affects of inflation on a society and why the populace hasn't had the politicians' collective head in a noose for it.

Of course deflated real wages operate in tandem with inflation to put pressure on the family but that blame lies more with the populace. I mean why did we ever think that significantly adding to the labor pool (double income families) wasn't going to suppress real wages?
How does Scuba optimize the stored data-sets for aggregation queries compared to Presto (Raptor connector)? They both use common columnar data storage techniques such as compression, delta encoding and dictionary encoding. The main difference seems to be the real-time nature of Scuba and the UI.
You think Asians do not have the same problem when they are in West? Asian are already treated as foreigners no matter how many generations
Interesting - Is there a good reference which describes the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in terms of parallel transport?
People had these devices explode and planes had to land due to them, I'd say some candor is in order.
http://www.blendle.com has quite a nice onboarding process if you ask me.
I have the opposite experience. We have many more informal channels and opportunities to check in and learn what other teams are doing by being remote and having our conversations openly in our group chat.

IMO, good communication, collaboration and transparency is not about remote vs. office. I'm sure we can find plenty of bad experiences for both.
"How about I'm not willing to work for you if you want control over my sleep cycle?"

Then why apply for the job?
That's because of how iOS grants camera and mic permissions, not because Facebook did anything right.
>He is less focussed on a specific threat

Call me a nit, but why are there typos in an article from the new yorker?

Edit: apparently doubling the consonant is something they just do - http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-double-l
I've noticed a rather sad correlation of passionate software developers that are interested in the trade with low pay

This isn't confined to developers. You find the same dynamic in commercial pilots (making an exception for Airline Transport Pilots with thousands of hours of experience!) and Park Rangers: enough well-qualified people want to do the work so badly that the pay remains very low.
Maybe that iOS devices actualy do in reality get updates far beyond any actual Android devices? Yes in theory Android devices could get security updates as long as iOS devices. But arguably the fact that in reality none of them do is somewhat relevant to actual people's actual choices about their actual security.
Obligatory DIY Planner link :)

http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official
Suppose we're using Facebook.

How do I send a text? Messenger.

How do I make a call? Messenger.

How do I make a video call? Messenger.

Try answering the same question using Google's services.