skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/29/po...

"But perhaps the most interesting and exciting aspect of all this is what it implies. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across. The fact that we found a planet that is even anything like the Earth at all orbiting another star only 20 light years away makes me extremely optimistic that earthlike planets are everywhere in our galaxy. 20 light years is practically in our lap compared to the vast size of our galaxy, so statistically speaking, it seems very likely it’s not unique. I don’t want to extrapolate from a data set of two (us and them), but if this is typical, there could be millions of such planets in the galaxy. Millions."
Search for shared RapidShare files
Thank you. Thank you so much for articulating this.

I'd like to add that historical site analytics should always be a factor in the web developer's decision to support IE6 or not - and in my experience, B2B companies almost always have 40+ percent of users still on IE6.

Yes, we all want IE6 to die. Yes, it makes life harder for us in the development community.

But telling a client that "you can save money on your website if we ignore IE6" is inherently disingenuous, unless your client is already a web technologies expert (and if they're outsourcing web development, I'm doubting that this is the case). Nine times out of ten, the client will jump on the cost-saving opportunity, you will avoid the hassle of developing for backwards compatibility, and you'll feel good for having just stabbed IE6 in the kidney. But when the client's site analytics say that 40% of the customer base is still on IE6 (and this is typical in my experience) then you'll be costing them FAR more in lost business than you'll be saving them in web development costs.

I hate IE6 too... but there's more to it than just the added cost of development - and as stated earlier, many users simply don't have a choice in the matter.
TED: Sources of good ideas
Before I came here, I did my own brief (and likely inaccurate) calculations:

Distance to Gliese 581 g: 21 light years
Speed of Helios 2 (fastest manmade object in space) = ~ 241350 km/h
Time for Helos 2 to reach Gliese 581g ~= 93 907 years

I couldn't help but think of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". 93 thousand years is an awful long time.
I'm glad I'm wrong.
A couple more questions. Would the presence of a magnetic field affect habitability? If so how? How likely is a planet this size to have a magnetic field like Earth's?

Say we did colonize this planet, would be be able to launch crafts into orbit from the surface? It seems like our rockets can barely escape Earth's gravity?
Working out is awesome and essential.

I also play bridge in my down-time.

http://www.bridgeworld.com/default.asp?d=intro_to_bridge&...
He's been actively developing Minecraft since March 2009, and back then he was getting only "tens" of sales per day, not the avalanche he's seeing now.
I don't see why that's sad. Sounds like great validation to me.
An astute acquirer would leave him to do pretty much as he pleases, while providing the infrastructure to support him.

E.g. Buffett / Berkshire are famous for letting their subsidiaries be run by the original, passionate management.
These are not unlike the carpetbaggers and traveling salesmen of the wild west days. People are always selling, and people are always buying.
"Qwiki"?... That's a rather unfortunate name.
For anyone who's curious, like me, Qwiki (Query Wiki?) is auto generated "wiki" pages on subjects pulled from multiple data sources. I haven't been able to find a demonstration video, but this seems similar to DDG / Google / Bing zero click information, only with more pictures.
Very good - http://xnxx.com/
Techno. The repetition gets me into a rhythm. I can listen to the same song on loop for hours. Each time finding some little nuance that I missed before. I suppose the same effect can happen with anything without vocals. But techno (for me) drives concentration.
If your URL-less item gets voted up, it will appear in the ask section. It works like the home page except items with URLs are filtered out.
Gmail (Google Mail) Tricks, Tips, Shortcuts 2010
That's not news, though. Better algorithms trump constant factors, and what is "naively written C++" if not a murder of bad algorithm choices?

I'd bet that people get shit done 10x+ times faster in awk/lua/python/ruby/lisp/whatever until having to work with nasty C++-specific libraries dominates, though. (C is friendlier that way.)
Ping, Facebook integration fell apart after 18 months of talks
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ handles most of that stuff.
The leadership knows how to move their peas around on the plate but they don't know how to cook.
If I had $500K lying around in Fall '04 I would have been chasing down Mark Zuckerberg trying to get him to take it for whatever tiny piece of the company I could get.

Being at one of the first set of "facebook schools" it was very clear where things were headed. The amount of mindshare facebook had on campus within the first couple weeks of the semester was absolutely staggering.
It's kind of frustrating sometimes, because a lot of these web apps are so trivial technically, compared to games.

OTOH one clear business lesson that experience has taught me is that it doesn't really matter how hard something is to do. What matters is how many people will pay for what you've done, and how much they'll pay.

Difficulty can be a moat to deter competitors, but that's about it.

Still, sometimes the "I wrote web app, I'm teh hot programmer!" can be annoying to us systems types.

returns to putting money where mouth is...
Honestly, I would imagine that most applications of something like this would ultimately end up with "picking the nicest looking image" and foregoing the dynamic tidbits.

That said, you could mash the geolocation that you did with locally-targeted weather data to create some pretty fun dynamic logo designs that would be fairly unique to the end user. You could even alter the skin of the entire site to match the "mood" of the user's location. The possibilities could get pretty extreme... even if you did eventually turn it off in the end :)
I hate to break it to you ... but the burden of proof is on you :D
Also, A World Out of Time, by Larry Niven - where a ramjet pilot returns to earth, only to find it ruined and way too hot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
I do like reading (non-narrative nonfiction mostly), but I can never seem to relax while doing so. Sitting up in a chair makes holding the book up difficult, reclining is no better, and lying in bed makes my back uncomfortable. How do people physically read for more than an hour at a time?
If you ever get the chance the lay in one, you'll be hooked. I just have the standard single nest + slap strap pro and it's amazing. The hammock packs down to the size of a softball and you can just clip them onto a backpack or anything, setup takes about a minute, and the material is almost like silk. I'm getting a rain fly and bug net next summer for some hiking trips. Can't wait to try it out in the real wild!
How To Create A Shitty Brand:
No one should buy Skype right now. They're main service is offered for free by Google right now. Also, as a company, they're undergoing a forced IPO from the investors who took the company from eBay (who was quick to divest to begin with). Rather than dealing with a former contendor past its prime, FB or Cisco should buy a rising startup in voip.
Clue - An Easy Way to Test your Site Visitors
There are at least five other companies, that I know of, all trying to do the same thing. Inevitably one or two companies will succeed in the e-wards market, while others will fail. At this point it is anybody's game - including yours.

TL;DR: Get going!
also for HN
There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
That makes it sound like Cuil. Is it?
Fine ; Atlantic Ocean to stone age man. In hindsight, sure, boat development was coming along and it was only a matter of time. But you take the average stone age man, and tell him that you can sail (or fly) across the ocean one day to another land - that's the sort of leap of faith we require now to believe in interstellar travel. Sure the distances are bigger than any analogy, but distances are just a function of speed. At the moment, it can't be done, so we have to rely on some nebulous concept of 'in the future the technology will be developed'. I want to say 'can't be done' but such challenges continually get overcome by the relentless march of technology. So I have to say 'can't say can't'. Thus it messes with my head.
Honestly, I'm just excited about the 60fps video that this brings along. Resolution is always a plus... but this 30fps (and sometimes even 24!) nonsense has gone on for too long.

The flicker was particularly noticeable during Avatar - if only James Cameron had gotten his way when he proposed to double framerate while filming that.

Also, for any who want to learn more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision
Ask HN: Dealing with insults from older, less capable marketing hire?
Hi guys,

I'm a semi-regular at HN, and dealing with something I haven't had to before at work -- I need some advice.

I'm a board member and CTO at a tech company that I co-founded. I've founded and sold (as CEO) a few companies in the last 10 years, and I'm in my mid-30s.

We recently hired a 50 something marketing guy; not my preferred hire based on his skills (mostly mid-size business, no tech, no startups). We've been in an uneasy detente since he joined; his first act was to tell me to change our domain name -- mine was to mail him back and tell him he needed to work with me and show some respect, to start by not demanding I do low skill tech jobs.

I work remotely, he works with in the same office as the CEO... You can imagine where the story goes from here. He recently asked for a 3x bump in his stock allocation and suggested that his salary be pegged to mine. I told him that it was absolutely not possible on the equity side, it was out of market rates for his job, and that we already had an agreement on these things.

Since then it's been sulking, complaining, etc. He pulled out a real winner today when he said in a management meeting that we shouldn't show customers our new product for feedback because that's what Commodore did and then they went broke.

I interrupted (see, I'm not blameless here!), and said it wasn't Commodore. He said it was, I offered to make him a gentlemanly bet, and he responded "you were in diapers."

My co-founder watched in bemusement.

I've made my case that I think this guy is not worth the pay and trouble internally with the CEO; while he's not a key hire, I certainly am. I have no idea what the company would do without me, but I'm getting to a point where I think that life is just too short to put up with schmucks who are rude and intimidated by a younger, significantly more successful player in their space.

Since I'm remote, I clearly am going to be at a political disadvantage, and I'm not sure how to proceed:

Here's my working list right now:

1) Let this guy sink his own ship by cutting all internal support out from under him -- he thinks he's so good; he can prove it.

2) Trash him on the board, and try and get some motivation to find a better fit.

3) Have a heart to heart with the CEO and tell him I'll be on my way soonishly unless this guy shapes up.

All these have some obvious drawbacks; I need the income in the near-term, so I can't threaten to walk immediately, nor do I wish to leave the company our customers, or my co-founder in that situation, as it would certainly jeopardize our fundraising.

Both 1 and 2 are just different politics angles, something I absolutely hate, and a large part of the reason I'm in the startup game.

I would not personally allow a management team to bicker and insult each other as CEO, but I'm not in charge here, so I'm stuck to my own devices.

Okay HN, pay me back with advice! I could certainly use it. Thanks in advance.
Conservation International (clean design. great copy. worth a look.)
Do at least 20 minutes of a hard aerobic workout. There's nothing like an adrenaline rush to relax you.
Retaining or Recreating Links
Developing a website is in itself a laborious, time-consuming and capital-intensive task.
Um I'm phasing out a ton of sun gear too.

They run opensolaris, but they have A very customized version. They are all Dell baby, and as far as I know oracle doesn't have much relationship to them.
Oh and Ben is right. ;)
That's very interesting. So really the trick is to somehow catch people to write a review before they leave. Of course the problem is to post it publicly would expose their identity (since they have a unique address) and possibly open them up to retribution from the landlord. So a kind of 'Yelp for Apartments' really doesn't seem like it would work.

One possible solution is to take advantage of the likelihood the last tenant still has forwarding setup with the USPS. If you could snoop out their last name, you could send the note addressed to them at the apartment and it would likely be forwarded to them where ever they went.
You're right... but it could also be more!
How many medical tourists are people with no connection to the host country purely there to find cheap care? My impression is that medical tourism is more talked about in America than practiced.

The subtext to healthcare discussions in the US always seems to be that no matter how bad things are in America, healthcare elsewhere must be a disaster. Also, Americans either have health insurance or they tend not to be in a position to pay at all, even if the procedure is significantly less expensive than at home.
Some problems decompose cleanly that way, some don't. It's not hard to design a system where most is functional, though, and that's still useful. You've probably done that without considering it "functional programming"TM, just trying to cut out global variables and whatnot. Decades ago, "structured programming" was the new thing, and manifestos appeared about how gotos were "considered harmful".

If you have a system where 95% of it is functional, cool, you've eliminated 95% of the places where you have to double-check for dataflow/mutability-related bugs. (To heavily paraphrase jerf's comment: functional programming is about accepting restrictions that make debugging simpler.) Make the system as clean as feasible, but don't get bent out of shape trying to get the last 5% FP-approved. It's probably less trouble to just know that's the hairy part.

The big idea in functional programming is that working with immutable data structures makes a lot of annoying bugs go away, and goddamnit, they're right. Does that mean you need to go 100% immutable? No - it's just a good default.

FP-style programming without (generational) garbage collection is really awkward, though - immutability means you're going to be creating a lot of temporary data structures. Good language implementations will recognize this and just stack-allocate them or let them go in the first collection.
Why Google should buy Twitter
Enhancements in Google Instant
Hmm, best informed investment? I think in this case there is a little more in play than just extreme luck.
ONMOUSEOVER loves you! It just wants to be your friend!

Also, I just noticed that buried deep within the body section is some juicy metadata about a Fiery Footlong Frenzy. I need to start slipping that into all the code I write. Maybe buried somewhere deep within a table. With some <strike> tags in between for good measure.
Feel free to correct my math

===================================

Voyager 2 (man's fastest space craft) is traveling 35,000 miles per hour / 60 = 583 miles per second.

187,000 miles per second equals the speed of light.

Light can travel 57,395,520,000,000 miles in one year (roughly 5.7 trillion miles).

So, in 21 years that would equal 57,395,520,000,000 miles x 21 years, or roughly 120 trillion miles.

Thus, if Voyager 2 was our space craft we'd have 583 miles per second x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days x 21 years to get 386,095,248,000 billion miles towards our new planet.

There is a huge gap between 386 billion and 120 trillion miles, like 311 times.

That means it would take us roughly 310 x 21 years = 6528 years to get there using current technology.

I just don't see us going there as being very practical.
With $40 million in funding a $80 million exit would barely repay the investors (they would break even if they owned 50% of the company, right? notwithstanding >1x liquidation preference, of course)
I ride - either mountain-bike or road. I love getting out and riding up the river or just wandering through areas I don't know. I see a lot more that I wouldn't if I were driving. It can be somewhat meditative and it's an antidote to sitting in front of a computer.
India to compile 'world's biggest' ID database
We can be sure, mathematically, that a lottery ticket is a bad investment overall even if it pays off. For example, repeating it 100,000,000 times is nearly certain to leave you with less than you started.

Plausibly, the decision to invest in Facebook (and similar opportunities when they present themselves) had a positive expected return at the time. Even knowing Facebook is an outlier result -- like a winning lottery ticket -- its payoff actually gives us a hint that the original decision was positive-expectation, and its magnitude. (The fact that a lottery ticket happens to win changes our idea of the original expectation not at all.)

Also of note: Thiel didn't just invest money, he invested his expertise and network. That, which almost certainly helped Zuckerberg aim higher and avoid pitfalls/compromises that took down other companies, was one of the best non-monetary investments ever.
I thought that is clear in the paper—I didn't have (almost) any experience with Haskell before, indeed.

And the stack trace example is not related to ghci. You run software in production, and it crashes. What do you get?
I suppose I mean "bitter-sweet"
Definitely talk with the CEO. Tell him how you feel about the marketing guy but skip the "fix it or I'm out of here" ultimatum.
Probably not, but shares a co-founder.
In truth, providing badge API's was corollary to my main idea, so it's not the end of it. Thanks for the pep-talk!
Given the options, I would still prefer earth.
"[Your favorite economically impoverished country here], home of IE6 compatibility."
I'm very skeptical about Qwiki. It's a text-to-speech Wikipedia/Flickr slideshow mashup. The most useful demonstration they gave was for a smart alarm clock. Not exactly a burning problem.

I'm surprised the judges were so easily impressed by this kind of flashy widget.
Climate change research still rejected by legislators
I think you need a minimum of four upvotes to be listed in the Ask section. Also, they are not mutually exclusive, your thread could be on the newest page, the ask page and the homepage at the same time.
Please bare what with you?
More on the 4chan Porn Leaks
It's not really actionable information at this point.
Voyager 2 (man's fastest space craft) is traveling 35,000 miles per hour / 60 = 583 miles per second.

187,000 miles per second equals the speed of light.

Light can travel 57,395,520,000,000 miles in one year (roughly 5.7 trillion miles).

So, in 21 years that would equal 57,395,520,000,000 miles x 21 years, or roughly 120 trillion miles.

Thus, if Voyager 2 was our space craft we'd have 583 miles per second x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days x 21 years to get 386,095,248,000 billion miles towards our new planet.

There is a huge gap between 386 billion and 120 trillion miles, like 311 times.

That means it would take us roughly 310 x 21 years = 6528 years to get there using current technology.

I just don't see us going there as being very practical.

--------

EDIT: I'm getting down voted for doing the math! Seriously?
So have you touched the PlayBook yet? Is the OS actually at that level as of this moment? At least that's what you're implying there by saying you're interning at RIM.
Good point; thanks for opening my mind to further possibilities. Either way, it's either underly or overly sensational at the moment.
The fact that I could sign up to CloudFlare's site and finish changing all my settings and nameservers before they even completed their presentation is a testament to their UI and ease of use. Their site went down for a few minutes a little bit later, which briefly caused some problems, but other than that I'm excited to see what results come from using their service. Oh, by the way, they had my vote for first.
This would be a sort of first step conversation to make sure we're on the same page is the idea, yes?
I think he was making a reference to a certain Big Bang Theory character..
Free Commercial Fonts
I think many programmers find it hard because experience with Algol-derived languages give them bad assumptions - they expect all of the conceptual baggage of mandatory stack allocation, so recursion seems ludicrous and complicated.

Recursive cases in languages with tail-call optimization are like inductive reasoning in mathematics - "How long is a list? If it's empty, zero, otherwise one (for the head) plus however long the rest is."
How about Twig?

http://www.twig-project.org/

It can be nice for both designers and developers. The real advantage is the sandbox extension that can make it safe for use in a publicly themeable site,
I don't think anybody with a desk places it with their back to the wall. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, professors, secretaries...but developers are more equal.
How Ink Is Made
I think we're going to see Xcode for Windows before we see iOS running on Macs. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no more Mac in five years.
If only it were possible to increase the speed of spacecraft somehow.
There were several variables in my statements.

Just a friendly reminder, you referred to pageviews as "the most important metric", thus my question.

User engagement...

While pageviews can be used as a mediocre proxy for user engagement, I don't think it proves your thesis at all. Which is more valuable, 5x the uniques, or a smaller group who loads more pages? Depend on additional variables, no?

Which pretty much certainly equates to more visits and more unique visitors than digg.

As far as I can tell (using compete pro), pageviews is the only metric where reddit wins, with digg winning handily in the others. Digg seems to have 5x the uniques, and 50% more visits. This strikes me as accurate, since reddit is focused on comments, and digg seems to focus more on links.

that is generating less value to consumers

How are you measuring that?

Are you asserting that reddit creates more value than digg, but they fail to effectively monetize and capture it? Or are you asserting that reddit's value is non-monetary, but still worth paying for?
One thing that really works is Meditation. Best combination is work out in a gym for about an hour and after that meditate for half hour. You are completely de-stressed after that.
Haskell's type system is unfortunate, because for most programmers, 80+% of the benefit comes from how it utterly nails the basics (checking variant type coverage in pattern matching, typeclasses), but the language community is focused on the cutting edge top .003%, because that's where the research papers are.
Two words- Minkowski Compensators.
You are correct regarding the reasons building codes were established. However, in the US, the sort of life safety issues which contributed to loss of life in the Coconut Grove fire (improper egress and flammable finishes) are handled by architects rather than engineers.

Engineering licensure requires a combination of education, testing, and work experience. I am unaware of any US jurisdiction which requires the Engineer's Oath in order to become licensed to practice engineering.

The Engineer's Oath does not address life safety or the welfare of individuals. Such a commitment might be incompatible with many engineering projects for the defense industry.

http://www.asce.org/Content.aspx?id=30076