skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Possible filters:

1. The singularity. (Though that begs the question: Why wouldn't robots be observable? Perhaps they exist at a largely "virtual" level, as code, even as they replace life.)

2. Dysgenics, aka, Idiocracy. At some point, it may be evolutionarily advantageous to not become more advanced. This is certainly true at present, on average, though the distribution of intelligence is becoming bimodal. The actual filter might ultimately involve a great genocide by Morlock-esque creatures.

3. Gamma ray bursts. Could wipe out millions of civilizations all at once.

4. Ice nine. This is the author's suggestion, basically. Some sudden discovery that wipes out humanity too quickly for us to recover.

....certainly, the author is correct in observing that there are no intelligent aliens, nor could they hide themselves unless they purposefully disabled every radio transmitter for the duration of their hiding.

ED: The wiki article is actually pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The first sentence is very incorrect. My 50 yr old aunt can use Windows. I tried installing Myth TV on a Red Hat distro and had to call for help.
I still believe it's a Good Idea to play safe until broader legal fallout is definitively ruled out one way or another

Ok, then don't use it.

Very likely, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Indeed. But do these "I wouldn't bet my life on it" concerns warrant "KLAXON KLAXON" hysteria?

then they're practically begging a judge to put together some interpretation of the law under which to hammer them

There's enough legal issues to worry about in life without inventing new scenarios in which you could fall afoul of hypothetical laws.
I probably will soon.
Laptops as Earthquake Sensors
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=537280&cid=23231...
It's hard because it's far more complicated than clicking an installer. I outlined the procedure. Anyone can do it once they understand it, but how would you ever guess to mount a virtual drive (most people wouldn't even understand what one is) and then the rest?
Summary of the evidence, from /.: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=537280&cid=23231...

1. Reiser showed up at his childrens' school the day after Labor day, the first school day after Nina disappeared and a day when Nina was supposed to pick up the kids. The prosecuter claims he was making sure the police didn't show up to ask where the kids' mother was. Reiser claims he went there to add his mother, Beverly Palmer, to the list of people that could pick up the kids. He was scheduled to pick up the kids the next day.

2. Hans' Honda CRX was missing the front passenger seat. It went missing sometime after he got a speeding ticket (after Nina disappeared) and before the police seized the vehicle.

3. Hans admits his hosed out the inside of the car. He removed the seat and threw it away. He also removed the carpet and disposed of it.

4. The car was also missing a piece of trim that Hans admits to throwing out.

5. Han's admits he was trying to hide the car from the police.

6. Nina's van was found three miles from Hans' home. Her cell phone was found in the van with the battery removed.

7. When Hans was taken into custody his cell phone did not have a battery in it. On the stand he claimed that he did not remove the battery from his own phone. He later admitted he lied about that. He actually removed it frequently after Nina disappeared.

8. Along with his cell phone, Hans was carrying his passport and several thousand dollars in cash.

9. Reiser was seen hosing down the driveway to his mother's home shortly after Nina disappeared.

10. The police found two books on murder in Reiser's car. He had purchased them with cash shortly after Nina disappeared.

11. He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case. He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.
I think it is only hard because your brain is thinking in terms of virtual drives and installers. For my grandma and my 11 year old cousins both types of installs are simply clicking various things on the screen until stuff works and are essentially equivalent.
Funny.. I found Liberation to be huge. At size 10, it's about the same pixel-size as Consolas at size 12!
Making a hologram out of a CD case (DIY)
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. The simple holograms are cool enough, but the obstructed 3d images are really incredible.
Building An Expanding DHTML Menu With CSS and JavaScript
the more you grow as a programmer your power to abstract things improves; with little more effort you can convey the same thing vividly to fellow programmers/managers and that is what this article talks about.

you cant communicate effectively if you dont hold the authority over the subject or havent done significant handson on the same topic.
Most advances are first military advances.

Canned food, sanitation, nuclear power, computers, all first developed in a wartime capacity
How in the hell do you think that dragging files to an "Applications" folder is unix-y?

Ubuntu: Synaptic or "sudo apt-get install xyz"
Fedora: "yum install xyz"

Certainly don't see any goofy dragging app files around here.
In which case you simply hit Cmd-Shift-H (or select 'Hide Others' in the app menu), which hides all but the active application...

Personally though, I generally just use Spaces to have different screens containing only applications that I want to use together. So I'll have a programming doc open in Preview, next to my XCode project window. Or I'll have a web browser open with Textmate if I'm doing something with Rails. That way you only have the apps that you are interested in on screen in any given 'space'.

Next quibble?
The Mildly Amusing Adventures of a Lowly Enterprise Technologist
An article from 2005 on a technique that is passe now (what no <li>'s?)

Karma bait...
Also NASCAR isn't number 1 by most metrics. Revenue, attendance, TV audience. It's second or worst by any meaningful measurement. That line is bandied about frequently but has no real truth to it.
I am not sure why .. but PG sometimes reminds me of the fat majin buu.
Cmd-Shift-H actually sends you "home" if that option is available. Opt-Shift-H hides others. The lame thing about hide others is there isn't a built in key command to show all.
My brain is thinking in terms of click the file and click ok vs. click something, figure out how to get the application, figure out where to drag it, do so, then try to get rid of the original file.

Some installers make the process easier with the little window that shows you both icons and tells you to drag the program icon to the applications icon. That's still far more complicated than Windows, but a lot better than most Mac programs, which don't even give you that.
we cringe at ASP.NET too :)
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Google is one of the Internet's darlings, universally loved by just about everyone. Read on to find out how you can segment your domain network so that Google can't take your entire portfolio down in one fell swoop.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that advanced civilizations aren't necessarily intelligent or conscious, at least how we define it. Something could be self-replicating on an energy level much beyond us without being particularly observant.
Absolutely! I will send you an Email and we can exchange info. I am always looking for people who I can bounce ideas off with :)
I dunno about that. The biggest baseball stadium in the US has about the same seating as the smallest NASCAR track. The biggest nascar track has five times as much seating. (250K @ Indy vs. 50K at Coor's field) It has to be #1 for attendance and at least number 2 for TV audience.
Nick mentions Environment Disaster as a possible existential risk, but perhaps the environment is a more mundane and yet still 'Great Filter' that befalls expansionist civilisations.

What if the resources required to leave the home planet (including here the resources required for generations of technological steps to reach that point) are more than an Earth-like planet can sustain? In other words, of necessity or as close to it as probability allows, intelligent life must destroy the sustainability of its home planet before it achieves the technology capable of leaving it.

Of course, by leaving it I'm talking on the scale required to explore and interact with neighbouring solar systems, not just sending Voyager 1 out there with a picture on its side.
Most Christians who've actually thought of their faith, (admittedly, that's few and far between) have most certainly already reconciled their beliefs with this subject. Off the top of my head, I'd imagine a reconciled Christian would say:

1. Aliens are not in the Bible, but nothing says they don't exist.
2. The Bible is God's message to man, and surely the Aliens will have their own message from the same God. (Actually, considering the similarities of Earth's religions, wouldn't that be something?) I digress.

Point being, the search for God will continue forever. It's part of human nature, and is ultimately an unknowable equation. Even with a thousand known species, people will ask why we are, and that can often lead to "because you were made to be".

I think it's foolish to expect a mass awakening on the discovery of ET. It's not going to happen. You'll have a few that will alter their beliefs, a few that will go wacko (thinking crazy white haired dude from Contact here) and everyone else will just ponder it for a while and carry on.
That's just wrong...
This is what my desktop looks like for more than 90% of the time:

http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop.png

If emacs wasn't taking up the whole screen, I'd have a scrollbar running down the middle of the screen, which would be really visually distracting.

I used virtual desktops a lot back when I used Linux for my desktop os. They're great, and I'm sure I'll use them again when I upgrade from Tiger. But, for me at least, they're no substitute for maximization.
Can't wait to try it! Get cracking! :)
accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project

I wouldn't be so sure...
If I had gone down this rathole, instead of merely peering over the edge of the conversational abyss... my proposal would have been along the lines of this EFF proposal that you reference.

Giving prisoners real-time access to broadband communication is fraught with complications. Giving them a computer with no network is not especially different from giving them books and letting them read and write paper mail -- which I support, of course.
I note that most of the rebuttal of this concept focuses on the Amazon example rather than the concept itself.

As an opportunity for a start-up or less well-known product company to secure distribution through other sites, this may be a beneficial point of differentiation.

The flip-side is that this new company would be choosing not to position its brand with the end consumer, as Amazon does, but rather with the various website hosts, like whatever company provides Store-Brand sugar and flour for your supermarket. This isn't a bad thing, though it means the business runs the risk of being overtaken by a company that builds its brand with end consumers through the affiliate route.
I started sketching the data structures and the user interface as soon as I saw it on reddit a few hours ago.

But, I'm pretty glad someone else is already working on it. I have finals this week.
Homer Simpson 100% in CSS :)
For anyone else that has no idea what "fat majin buu" means (it's surprisingly hard to Google for, as most links are dead or tiny):

http://www.comicvine.com/buu/41116/costumes/&c=8591

I don't see the similarity.
And projectpath.com (among other choices) for the actual Basecamp account. It doesn't even have the name in it! But it doesn't need to.

Having the commonly used name isn't always a great idea anyway. You might want to avoid python.com (NSFW), for example. But the Python folks could have easily gotten codepython./com|net|org/
Google's Guice: A Dependency Injection Framework
Let me tell you a story about a language called "Stutter"
Why Skype should buy mobile client iSkoot
I'd like to believe in friendly aliens, but I changed my expectations since I read "Collapse". I don't recall if there were in fact any friendly encounters, but for the most part I remember from the book that newly discovered human populations were destroyed by the explorers from other countries.

There is also at least one example of a pacifist society that was completely butchered when they were discovered by less pacifist people, even though they gave those people a friendly welcome.
pick one study or argument, which is the best, and i'll look into it more carefully.

the wikipedia article is lengthy, and contains errors, but if i point one out you will presumably say there's another part that's better. that's fine, but let's skip that step and go straight to the part you wish to stand behind.
How2: Debug Google Engine Apps in Eclipse.
But Phil Spector hasn't done important work in over three decades. Different story altogether...the world will not suffer without his creative output, while I suspect it will in the case of Reiser. Though, we might find that without his cantankerous and obstinate style of addressing the LKML ReiserFS may wind up more widely used. That assumes that the SuSE folks keep working on it, and the Namesys guys are able to keep the company going under new leadership (this is a problem, as Hans' stubbornness and passion for the idea is the primary reason Namesys has lasted as long as it has, and I doubt anyone else will have that crazy drive to keep it going--the best thing that could happen is probably a buyout by SuSE or IBM or similar).
They became smaller. Found a galaxy in every atom and started colonizing them. Life on the micro-level is fun because the speed of light is relatively huge.

They became faster. Foreseeing the heat depth of the universe, they invented a way to squeeze an eternity of subjective time into a second of real time, and stayed there. Or turned around in time. Or started oscillating back and forth in the same time interval.

They invented wish control, eliminated the survival instinct and went extinct.

They contacted God and ascended.
Benevolence seems to be something our species is trending toward, and is in someway required as part of the foundation for civilization. As such, I think its reasonable to believe that conscious or any derivatives thereof would be concerned with the welfare of less advanced beings.
Tell us when you're done? And do you need help with coding?
.dmgs threw me for a loop the first time I tried a Mac, as well. If somebody had just told me "they're compressed loopback devices" I would have understood (I was coming from Linux), but I was expecting them to be like tarballs and spent a while confused.
The idea that the number could be as high as 10% success makes me ecstatic. Considering the chance of being admitted to the grad or med school of choice, those odds sound pretty good to me.
Had they actually installed the applications, or did they keep running them from the mounted dmgs?
Lol, actually we're both wrong. It's Opt-Cmd-H... At least it is when using French keyboards...
It sounds like you're either incompetent or just unwilling to learn.
Do us a favor and hit C-x 3 sometime :)

http://jrock.us/emacs-20080420.png
Seed technology investment with a twist
Prototype Invest is a bringing new meaning to seed technology investment. They will build you a working prototype in exchange for equity in your idea. Interesting...
I personally found it more intuitive than the windows method. You don't know how many people you hear about screwing up windows some way because they just thought deleting the folder in program files would be enough. Or thinking that the shortcut is the program and deleting it would uninstall it. All those explanatory message boxes that come up in windows comes from common mistakes and misconceptions that show up in user usability testing.

Mac: The application is a file. To get rid of it, just delete it like a file.
Windows: You have to run a program to install it, and run a program to uninstall it. Do it any other way and

The mac paradigm is a bit leaky although, with .pkg files and what not. The .dmg distribution method is a bit annoying, but it allows developers to add fancy graphics when people install their programs.
Full agreement. A+++, would upvote again.

I was trying to enumerate the good qualities of Hans. If it were someone else, I would have listed their positive qualities. I didn't mean to imply that they should affect the verdict, but meant to communicate "if we're wrong about Hans, the following value is lost: an extremely smart person, ..."
Interview with JAJAH’s Daniel Mattes on the eve of their deal with Yahoo!
Where’s the next new thing in Silicon Valley?
whoops... yeah, that's it.
General Problem Solving Strategies (for programmers)
There needs to be some line drawn to what is considered a startup. Incorporating is one of the bare minimums. Before that, it's called a startup idea.
I received an unsolicited, ahem, "invite" email. The invite asked me to submit an exec summary...
exists ⇒ ¬ie-only

I think that's the only way I can put it without getting into trouble :)
that's probably because GNU/linux programs must/can run on windows (emphasis on GNU)

other OS like OpenBSD doesn't give fuck about windows users. It's just created and used by and for themselves (altho others port it to virtually every os - OpenSSH? )

and no, i feel no hate from OpenBSD people toward windows users, at least not as much as linux users' in forums -- maybe if u really love what you do, you have no time to criticize others shrug

to me, OSX is also created for windows users (people who are less computer savvy) so i feel it's lacking (i use tiger for 3+ years)
"First you download a dmg file which, when clicked, creates a virtual drive. On the virtual drive is the program, which you then have to drag into your Applications folder. Then you have to unmount the virtual drive and delete the dmg file from your desktop"

"There’s no way that anyone could guess this procedure"

You are kidding right? My wife guessed this. My 9 year old can do this. It's brain dead simple, and makes perfect sense - you can see what stuff is there before you install. You can read a readme sometimes before installing.

I think it helps when trying something new, to have an open mind. Instead of just saying "eugh! this is different. It must be bad"
Wtf, their tagline is "apps for equity."

So sketch
True, of course, but I wasn't talking about friendliness not happening in New York homes and offices. However, from my experience, in public life there you can get more easily punished for not sporting a pokerface than elsewhere, and it's one of the very few places where I've been going out at night with locals habitually carrying guns.
>Benevolence seems to be something our species is trending toward

Definitely

>and is in someway required as part of the foundation for civilization

I disagree. The foundation of a civilization is energy and how much energy a civilization can use. See the Kardashev scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

I'm trying to say that something could exist that is so fundamentally different from us that it really doesn't care about our existence. Right now, the biggest organisms on earth are fungi. There are some truly enormous fungi. Imagine a fungus or set of fungi that start converting radiation directly to mass for itself to grow. It could expand to surround its local sun. In certain ways, this fungus is more advanced than us, but it would eat us alive without noticing it was doing anything wrong, because it isn't capable of having the thought required to have morality.
Semantic Search the US Library of Congress
I guess you will announce your beta here on YC once you have something. Very interested.
Outsourcing is your best shot, in my opinion. It's what I do, even though I'm a developer myself. I just don't have the time. It only takes a few thousand and you can have any app developed. The technical decisions are critical. I wouldn't trust someone else, such as this company, to make those decisions for me.
> a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.

That's a bad idea: if we accuse someone of some awful crime, and decide there's only 1/10 confidence in a guilty verdict, they should still serve a small fraction of the time? Someone's either guilty or not. If they are, there are sentencing guidelines that take various other factors into account.
"and what the hell is a keychain?"

Obviously if you don't know what it is, it must be bad! Don't find out what it is, just assume it's bad :/

What the hell is a 'registry'? :P
http://www.exitmundi.nl is a great collection of the Great Filter candidates.
on maximize & dual monitor

why do you have to put extra efforts when you can just use tiled wm (i use dwm and dmenu) ? maximizing comes automatic

don't two monitors kill your focus flow? maybe you are more productive (result from research by monitor manuf - doing repetitive stuff)

the real danger is you'll be less creative
Looking at the source paper, "PageRank for Product Image Search", it's clear this is the same approach Peter Norvig described at SS08.

Namely, start with a large set of candidate images based on textual context. Then, create a similarity graph between them using extracted features that are somewhat robust against scaling and other transformations. Then, find the central clusters of that graph, picking the 'most representative' images in the clusters as good, unique results.
PS #1: If Munjal Shah of Riya is quoted accurately -- “I think what they’re trying to accomplish is largely impossible... Our belief is, there is not large-scale solutions.” -- then Google is lucky to face such easily-discouraged competitors.
PS #2: Because TechCrunch included a DocStoc embedding of the source WWWConf paper in its story, the DocStoc page is right now the #2 result at Google for the paper title, "PageRank for Product Image Search". Scribd, fire up your SEO and MA/KA engines!
I think nostrademons was talking about gathering statistics, not the narrative of their life.
The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations

Think what that implies. If the hunter-gatherer mode of life couldn't support a large population, how was that limit enforced? It had to be by people dying.

But that wasn't what I was asking anyway. I wasn't asking why agriculture won, but why it started. The first agriculturists must have switched from being hunter gatherers. Why, if life wasn't better?

(I realize the switch was a matter of degree, so consider the preceding question as an abbreviation for asking why about each degree of switch.)
I have a few questions.

Is the game grid-based or free form?

Is the image advanced on a timer or at the player's control? If it is a timer, does the interval ever change?
Very typical response - slightly angrier, but overall the same experience I had.

I am surprised Matt didn't notice the slicker look and feel, and far better responsiveness of OS X. I am continually surprised at what my Mini can manage with 512mb of RAM compared to my M1330 running Vista with 3GB.
I'm not saying I disagree, but consider why this may be so: you would be pretty peeved as a shareholder if the board sold to their friends for significantly less money.
> network-effect kool-aid

It's not just hand waving. I'd recommend the book by Varian (now Google's chief economist) and Shapiro, "Information Rules". Of course, the strength of "network effects" may be exaggerated in some cases. In others (eBay), they most certainly aren't.