skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at a few numbers that we will assume to at least be in the ballpark, and roughly correspond with scientific consensus:

1. The Universe is assumed to be 13.7 billion years old.

2. Nothing can move faster than c, so light years are an
effective measure of the maximum distance anything can travel since its inception.

3. Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old.

4. The universe is 13.7 billion light-years across.

Now, from these, I'm going to make a few propositions, given the lack of obvious extraterrestrial intelligence:

1. Stars stable enough to create life didn't appear until fairly late in the game, around the 9 billion year mark.

2. 5 billion years is a better-than-average time for a star system to stabilize and evolve life.

3. Stars stable enough to create life are still fairly sparse, as life in this universe is still fairly young.

4. Assuming 7 billion years as a bare minimum for the starting point for this process, and assuming the Earth is fairly quick, a reasonable upper bound for the distance that a civilization must be from us to have contacted us is 2 billion light-years.

Of course, there are a lot of variables here, and it's highly probable that maximum reasonable speed for a life-form to travel is as low as .1c, which means that even a civilization that sprung into existence at 6 billion years (assuming a star system stabilized very early in the game and then also evolved life in the better-than-average time of 5 billion years) would only be able to travel 1 billion light years, cutting off a fair amount of the universe from contact.

While the numbers involved in the time since the big bang are large, the distances a hypothetical civilization would have to travel are probably larger, especially given that evolving life, in our solar system's case, took well over a third of the time since the big bang, and that's not counting the circumstances that brought about the formation of our solar system, which took the remaining 2/3rds.
Well!
Made and shipped Pepbot.

http://pepbot.com

It's a disposable temp email app with the ability to automate the confirmation task that many services require (wait the mail > click the confirmation link > receive account > success).
Writing DSLs in Javascript
Article from 2 years ago on the 'Arsenic-loving bacteria'
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/August/15080802....
Speaking without any domain knowledge, I think it has to do with "what can support the complexity required for life?". I would think it requires molecules that can do interesting things while at the same time survive their environment long enough to do those things.
Thanks! Noted. For the image url, are you pressing enter after pasting your URL? Let me know if that doesn't work, and if not, we'll drill down into why it's not working for you (def want to fix it if it isn't).
Is that a cop they're talking to at the end? And why do they omit their names and blur out faces at the end, but still keep the guy's face in at the beginning?

Great video. :)
I don't think they need to learn how to program well enough to make the idea they had, but they should learn something about the process of software development. Even if that just means reading a couple books on managing softward development (almost anyone asking this question hasn't even spent 8 hours 1 day reading blogs like coding horror or joel on software).

Understanding some of the challenges in writing software, being able to succesfully communicate with their software developers, understanding that "build me twitter for pets" is not a spec etc.

I had someone come to me the other day and they thought they had a brilliant idea, if only I could put it together (but it would probably be easy). He described Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to me. I told him it already existed. He was deflated.

Since he couldn't even understand what he was talking about, he wasn't really even able to do competitive analysis and didn't know these things existed.
The issues may be different, but the doubt that is raised now in the one true way path of life are real.
I've been following Carmack since Wolf3D. It's always a pleasure to see what he's doing next.
Making Issue Trackers Play Together Nicely
Right, I guess 'methane-based life' was poor wording. Suffice it to say that this discovery implies that life can form in ways and places that we've never considered.
Interesting that he's warming to the console model that iOS derived from PS and Xbox.

It sounds like there's a space for something like Steamworks to exist on Android--this is one area where fragmentation isn't just a vacant slur.
I somewhat but not entirely agree with this. I definitely agree in the case he discusses: there are way too many people with vague ideas who "just need a programmer". I don't think the root problem is that implementation is the source of all value, though. In their case, they don't understand how to develop computational ideas in a useful way at all. It's not the lack of C++ knowledge or Ruby knowledge, but the lack of a general understanding of computational thinking.

A computationally-literate idea that's well developed, on the other hand, can be very valuable, and can account for probably 90% of the interestingness of idea+implementation. Not always: sometimes you find really major things in the implementation that cause you to rethink the idea. But there are many times that I've implemented a theoretical idea myself and not really learned anything in doing so. You read a paper, or even a blog post, which explains an idea in detail, motivates why the author developed it, gives a broad sketch of how you'd implement it, etc., etc., but the author hasn't actually implemented it. Then I implement it myself. Have I provided the majority of the value, because I'm the first person with working code? Not really; in many cases the implementation was a pretty straightforward translation of the idea into code.

A computationally literate and well-developed idea is arguably something close to "execution", but not quite the nuts-and-bolts variety. To use a physics analogy, my ideas on space travel are not very well developed or valuable, but Freeman Dyson's are valuable, even though he's implemented his ideas to the same extent I have: neither one of us has ever attempted to build spaceships. He's a pure idea-person, but his ideas are developed quite fully, so readers can understand what he proposed and why, what its pros and cons might be, what possible pitfalls await, what the broad outlines of possible fixes for those pitfalls might be (even if they depend on materials or other things not currently available), etc.

I'd say the same of people even further into idea-land, like Isaac Asimov, who provided valuable ideas with nothing close to an implementation. The trick imo is that most ideas either just aren't novel enough to be interesting, or aren't sufficiently well developed and explained to provide value to a reader.
How to install Flash Player 10.2 on Chrome/OSX
Now I know how they stole money from my dad's back account. Stupid Indian Bank, not able to stop what's happening at mass scale: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Cloned-ATM-card-leaves-wom...
OK I am going to bite... what should "people" use instead?

SCP/SFTP? Adds quite an overhead and puts more load on the server; I have never reached even nearly the same dl rate with scp/sftp that I would get with ftp and we are talking lame 2 Megabytes/s here.

HTTP? I'd like to be able to resume and I want the nice comfort of being able to download a whole file structure with a single click. I am not going to click on 10000 single links in a browser.

Other than that I cannot think of an alternative to list here but I would be very happy and thankful if you could point me to a few.
That is actually an idea worth pursuing. Hm. Thanks!
Deficits are money that the government owes. Which will have to be paid.

Where do you think the money will come from to pay those debts?
The scientists that made the discovery work for NASA.
Edit: That is to say, the work that led to this discovery was funded by NASA, and was done to gain information about how to look for life on other planets.
No, if the appreciated asset was pre-tax, at their death, then their heir's get to immediately sell it without paying capital gains.

If you do not have to file a federal estate tax return, then your basis in the inherited property is its appraised value on the date of passing for state inheritance or transmission taxes. Otherwise the property inherited from a descendent usually has its value or basis determined in one of the following four ways:

The appraised fair market value as of the date of passing.
The fair market value on the alternate valuation date if a personal representative of the estate chooses to use alternate valuation.
A special-use valuation method for real property used in farming or a closely held business if chosen for estate tax purposes.
When the land that is part of the decedent's estate is a qualified conservation easement, then it may qualify for an adjusted cost basis.
http://www.money-zine.com/Financial-Planning/Tax-Shelter/Capital-Gains-Tax/

PS: This loophole still exists for the untaxed portion of an inheritance.
Don't forget the most recent success of our information agencies, the printer bomb that was intercepted and defused. That was a big success to our current security systems.

What does the TSA do though? Ban printer cartridges on planes. WTF?! I thought this was a success? Now it's being treated like a failure?

I'm waiting for the first congressman to openly call out the TSA as a terrorist organization. He or she will get my vote for the rest of my life.

Great article Mr Schneier, couldn't have said it any better.
A Study of Psychopathy
As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
> Phosphorous not being required for life seems obvious to me

It hasn't been noticed or proved, and conclusions drawn from actual science have a tendency to disprove common sense once in a while, which makes any actual discovery worthwhile.
I don't think this is hindsight bias though. As a scientist (not in biochemistry or astrobiology, though) I understand this had to be specifically shown, but this is one of those things that most people I talk to and I have always just casually treated as obvious. The confirmation is important scientifically, but shouldn't change our viewpoint, since it's what we've always expected. Am I wrong here? Any computational biologists or biochemists want to tell me this wasn't expected at all?
Layoffs still work like that sometimes, especially in manufacturing.

It makes sense if, say, you work at a supplier for Ford, and Ford slows their production temporarily, so they don't need the part you make. So you get laid off for a month or two, knowing Ford will gear back up eventually and start ordering more parts.

That doesn't happen in most industries. But even if it did, who's going to want to sit on their heels without an income hoping they'll be brought back in?
Well it was about a year in the making, but we finally launched our product to the public:

http://www.gethifi.com

Getting it out the doors is a great feeling!
I think that Google bought YouTube for 1.5b. I think they've probably dumped at least another 500 Million into them putting the total price tag at about $2B. Assuming for a minute that YouTube could reach profitability next year, I think it would likely take at least another 5 years for Google to recoup its initial investment.

Thats now a 10 year window before the YouTube investment does anything but drag on Google's bottom line and more importantly $2B dollars that Google can't spend on another, better acquisition.

Yeah I think YouTube was a mistake for Google, its the opportunity cost that kills me. I think that money could have been better spent elsewhere.
Julian Assange Early Childhood Hacking
Which system are we talking about?

The "keep bombs off of planes" system failed.

The "keep folks from blowing up bombs on planes" system succeeded.

Note that the former is what the US govt is claiming to do while the latter was entirely the doing of random folks on the plane.

Do we have any instances of air marshals stopping anyone? I ask because both the shoe and underwear bomber were handled by ordinary people.
And meanwhile, the government spent over a trillion dollars more in FY 2009 than it had received in revenue.

Over half of government spending is in three areas that will not be touched by members of either party: Defense, Social Security, and Medicare & Medicaid.

Whining about the loss of a piddly $6.5 billion one year is like going on about cutting pork or "waste" - a demonstration that one wants to appeal to peoples' anxieties about unsustainable government spending while being utterly uninterested in doing anything about the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
Greg Linden has another take on this, agreeing: "Groupon is not Googly" http://glinden.blogspot.com/2010/12/groupon-is-not-googly.ht...
launched it. i'm not super comfortable sharing it just yet with the HN crowd just yet because (1) its starting to reach the upper limits of the tiny slice i'm running it on and i'd like to save those resources for users, and (2) its super niche and i only know of 3 HN users who would maybe ever use it.

its basically a statistics gathering/analytics app for a sport. 24 hours and about 150 registered users. it currently only has a free version and i'm working on new features for a paid version.

i'm stuck on pricing, though. not sure how much people will be willing to bite on any paid version of what i'm offering, even if i added some super awesome features.

i use it, though, and thats what counts.
I got the Tab for two reasons and am verry glad with my decision to do so. The first being, the tab can act as a wireless router for up to five devices. Being a freelance and always up and down the road this was a big selling point. I knoew my data acesss was going to come from Verizon I just had not settled on a device upon finding out the Tab could provide access I was sold. The second reason was the reason I was holding out for a Android based tablet and that it flash. My kids play games on pbskids.org and disney.com purchasing a device that does not support flash would have killed my ability to use it as an entertainment device while at dinner or other events that kids become natural bored at. As for the purchase, I could not be happier it is a well put together machine that I fell is as good as the iPad in some ways like voice recognition it is far superior.
Best jQuery Plugins of 2010
While I didn't actually launch anything, I did make a lot of progress on two separate apps:

One to facilitate collaborative tabletop games (think Settlers of Cataan or Dungeons & Dragons) between remote parties. Built with node.js, redis, jquery, html5, css3, buzzwords.

Another smaller, quicker app that spun off the first was a web interface for the OS X `say` command. Sometimes I'm on ubuntu or windows and I wish I had access to make a mac actually speak a sentence. Built using the same stack, same tools, just much smaller in scope.

I only pivoted late in the month, the day after thanksgiving, so I'm hoping to launch that after I tidy up the UI and come up with a name. Anyone have any suggestions?
Funding startups through city investment funds?
The DOJ's realtime credit card monitoring system
> They have owned it for 4 years and so far it has never been profitable. So far Google has lost billions on YouTube.

Can you cite this? I think you're wrong. I haven't seen any reports of YouTube's profitability since the Google purchase. There has been lots of speculation and discussion, but Google has never disclosed the information.

YouTube was losing tons of money the day Google bought them. But since Google owns much of the fiber used to deliver the videos, they likely pay little to nothing for bandwidth. Also, they have ads now, in videos. Nobody but Google knows how much money those ads bring in.
the article seems to be attacking it from the wrong angle.

It doesn't matter to Google whether Groupon is the best way for businesses to target consumers provided enough business owners see enough results to validate the model and keep trying it. Display advertising has been around for centuries despite it's far-from-universal effectiveness

On the other hand it's a $6 billion mistake if Groupon's main assets (sales team and culture) become the first casualties of acquisition and leave them with the world's most expensive domain name and mailing list, however good the model might be.

I'm guessing somewhere in between - it's not too difficult to conceive GOOG achieving >$6 billion worth of growth in discount-based local ads revenue over the next few years and claiming the acquisition paid for itself in record time, but it'll leave unanswered the question of whether they could have done it perfectly well without buying a 2 year old brand built on Adwords.
it's a really big deal... provided the arsenic is actually incorporated into nucleic acids, and the bacteria aren't just surviving on background levels of phosphate.

it will be interesting to read the original paper when it comes out in Science later today, and not just accounts of the paper from other sources
Do we know if air marshals were on the flight? Sample size is too small to draw conclusions.
Exactly. Every system will experience failure; it's how the system responds to the failure that is so important.

You can only reject the robustness principle ("Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) if you can completely control the input 100% of the time.
Sometimes our fears can get the best of us. This is one of those times.
Eve Ensler on Security
Criticizing node.js for not knowing how to restart itself is like criticizing Python for not knowing how to restart itself. node.js is an interpreter, it doesn't implement every part of a production stack.

I don't use Forever, but I use upstart with respawn which is similar, and I use it to monitor not just node.js daemons but also ones written in python, bash, and whatever else. Monitoring software is a reasonable part of a stable production system; it indicates a healthy ecosystem rather than a deficient one.
The ultimate goal is to keep folks from blowing up bombs on planes, correct?
I am glad my workplace is a bit less pathological.
Yeah, sorry about that - I was especially interested in this part of the transcript and didn't notice the other submissions beforehand
>and the 180 portraits, area data, graphical content, cutscenes, etc? I presume they're all free

No, I was marvelling that the text alone took up 10% of the program area (if it weren't compressed) and that this was then quite amazing given all the other stuff.

Basically the only thing of interest in the article for me was the size of the program .. oh actually I was pretty impressed with the graphics, given the limitations they were working in.
The other way to look at it is what if Google HAD NOT bought YouTube. What if it had gone to Microsoft? Or Comcast? Sometimes keeping something away from your competitors is enough of a reason.
If you stop flying as a result of this nonsense, then the TSA really will have won.
Yes, beside the fact that they found a way to change the structure of their DNA, RNA, and a few hundreds enzymes involved in energy metabolism they are the same...

This is so huge that my money go into a mistake: I bet these bacteria just found a way to either get rid of arsenic or to neutralize its allosteric toxicity by maskerading or something. The paper is not out yet so I cannot give my opinon on the experimental data but from what I read there is no evidence that DNA actually contains arsenic and until that arrives I believe it's a red herring.
Setting up a VPN server on Ubuntu
Simple tutorial for setting up OpenVPN on Ubuntu with a Mac client.
I would say strongly, yes, they are making a $6B mistake. I'd say it is tantamount to Yahoo acquiring Geocities in 1999.

Groupon will never become a juggernaut site the size of Facebook or Craigslist. It's niche and a novelty, not any kind paradigm shift in online marketing that so many in SV seem to think it is.
Q & A with Gowalla Co-Founder and CTO, Scott Raymond
Offline Shopping is Alive and Trampling
It goes to show that even if space and bandwidth are cheap (and they will only get cheaper), creating content will always be enormously expensive.
Or better, give the option to change to a vanity id.
Yes, the touchstone of everyone's work should be how well it compares to the figments of one's imagination.

Poor Einstein! If only he'd discovered warp drive, he'd be as famous as Zephraim Cochrane!
http://www.yuanfenflow.com/hackerspace

Just got it up! Right now it's a simple (bi-lingual,双语言) information page for v0.0; after our first meeting, we'll get something that's stand-alone.

If you want to be a part of this, please send me an email and we an set up a meeting prior to the launch on Dec. 11th. stephen [@t] yuanfenflow [d0t] com

Thanks for all the feedback + info! 万分感谢！
There are lots of alternative explanations proposed. Quick transitions into more advanced, less detectable communication technologies, for example.
Wouldn't it be great if Bruce Schneier was in charge of the TSA? (not that he'd probably want/enjoy the job). Then, I'd feel a lot better about things.
Too many business people think programming is a commodity that can be easily outsourced. Too many programmers think business people all have vague ideas. They are both wrong.
Hah, you're going to have to learn to break that down a little more. What is the speed of the average request? How much of that is network delay? How much of it is the server taking to respond? PHP/MySQL don't seem like the optimal tools for serving video...
"The researchers isolated the organism and found that when cultured in arsenate solution it grew 60% as fast as it did in phosphate solution — not as well, but still robustly. The culture did not grow at all when deprived of both arsenate and phosphate."
Craiglist is perhaps not the first example I would go to if I needed to discount Groupon's hundreds of millions of revenue.
Sounds like someone mis-marketed the event.
Yup, that was it (extract):

"Hi Steve, it's Cabel, from Panic."

"Oh, hey Cabel! Nice to meet you. So tell me, what'd you think of iTunes?"

"Well, I think it looks great! You guys have done a great job with it. But, you know, I still feel we'll do all-right with Audion."

"Oh, really? That's interesting, because honestly? I don't think you guys have a chance."
It's not the fastest way, by far. It tends to lead to more testable code, sure, but it's not fast.

For example, TDD encourages code churn: you write tests for a lot of throwaway code.

Personally, it usually takes me two/three attempts before I'm satisfied with the version of the code that I have. Writing tests for these throwaway attempts is a waste of time.

As you become more experienced in writing tests and testable code, you realize that you no longer need TDD to write code that can be easily tested, so I see TDD more as "training wheels" for beginners.
Unless they are doing some clever filtering, this can be very easily abused.
It does seem overwhelmingly likely to be a mistake. But an exciting one! Biochemistry sports fans like myself will watch with interest.

EDIT: Hey, my upvote voted you down by mistake! Somebody upvote the parent, please.
How about a combination of the two? A telescopic arm positions its payload over the given cleaning target, and releases a small cleaning robot tethered on a string. The "spider" has the tech to minutely go over the surface of the target and clean it, while the arm has only the "macro" capabilities.